SHATTERED IMAGE
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Lions Gate Releasing Director: Raul Ruiz Writer: Duane Poole Cast: William Baldwin, Anne Parillaud, Graham Greene, Lisanne Falk, Bulle Ogier
While I'm entering words into the computer, I know I'm not dreaming. How do I know? I can ask myself, "Am I dreaming?" and decide rationally that I am not. But when I'm dreaming, I rarely have the free will to ask myself this question, and so I think I'm living in reality despite the illusion of it all. Illusion vs. reality is one of the great themes of storytellers and in "The Shattered Image" director Raul Ruiz pushes the envelope by having his principal character, Jessie (Anne Parillaud), confused to the point of insanity about which of her two sides is the real Jessie. She dreams she is a hard-featured hired killer who preys on men, a hit woman doing her job for women who want to dispose of their masculine baggage. Or is the leathery-looking assassin the real Jessie and the soft, vulnerable, victimized Jessie her dream? As the two sides of the same woman collide with each other, a harsh sound like a gunshot or the ring of a telephone or the shattering of glass brings one Jessie up sharply and turns her into the other.
A major motif of "Shattered Image" is the absence of dramatic irony. The audience, instead of being a step or two ahead of the characters (as in the "Oedipus" legend) is kept as much in the dark as the principal character, the enigma finally revealed in the concluding moments to Jessie and to the movie audience simultaneously.
This is not the conventional whodunit, as Agatha Christie might have constructed the drama, but is done rather in the French style, which compared to the American form is paced more leisurely with greater emphasis on psychology than on action. It's quite an intriguing piece which might remind film buffs of the late Kryzstof Kieslowski's even more cryptic "The Double Life of Veronique," in which two women, one Polish and one French, subtly affect each other's lives while remaining total strangers.
Duane Poole's script opens on the stony-faced contract killer, Jessie (Anne Parillaud), who sits at a night-club table ignoring the martini that a trio of businessmen have sent over to her, but who follows one of them into the men's room to complete her part of a contract. Director Ruiz soon shifts to another Jessie, a kinder and gentler woman, who has met a handsome young man under strange conditions and is on an expensive honeymoon in Jamaica with her new husband, Brian (William Baldwin). Brian is an understanding man indeed, nursing his bride through some troubled, paranoid times in which she obsesses over an incident in which she was attacked by a rapist who was chased away by Brian--a modern knight in shining armor. Having survived several suicide attempts, she lives through her traumatic experience not by recalling the incident directly but via nightmares in which she has become the femme fatale, the hired executioner. Or is it the other way around?
You may remember Anne Parillaud as the title character of Luc Besson's 1990 French-Italian film "La Femme Nikita"-- which was successfully remade American style starring Bridget Fonda and which became a successful TV series. The Chilean-born director, Raul Ruiz, patterns his picture in the European manner, allowing the plot to unwind ever-so- slowly and tantalizingly in his second American-made, English language feature. (In 1990 he shot "The Golden Boat in New York with a 16mm camera and black-and-white film). The prolific and gifted regisseur turned out "Genealogies of a Crime" last year with a similar strain, highlighting Catherine Deneuve in a dual role as the lawyer for and victim of a strange young man who's accused of murdering his psychiatrist aunt after she allegedly subjected him to radical mind-control treatments. Paired characters--a "which twin is the phony"--is always a enticing motif. Ruiz fruitfully utilizes the concept to match polar opposites--concerned husband vs. knavish cur; hard-hearted woman vs. unprotected prey; the warm, tropical ambience of Jamaica with the foggy, cold and rainy Seattle; sophisticated jazz with island reggae.
Shot in Port Antonio, Jamaica, and Vancouver, Raul Ruiz's "Shattered Image" is likely to find its audience among sophisticated moviegoers who relish the puzzlement raised by the picture with each shift in focus.
Not Rated. Running Time: 103 minutes. (C) 1998 Harvey Karten
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