Go Go Tales (2007)

I grew up in the ‘90s, and this movie made me feel like a kid again, but in the way a kid feels when he’s flipping through naughty movies late at night on his parents’ TV. You know, those movies with silly characterizations of “bad” people who eventually get their comeuppance, but at least they get a good sex scene or two. Kind of a loose remake of a movie that was already loose to begin with, Abel Ferrara’s undistributed 2007 film is like a comic, Altmanesque version of John Cassavetes’ Killing of a Chinese Bookie, replete with intermittently titillating striptease and a dedicated, overzealous owner (Willem Dafoe) looking to break even. Yet while that film ventures out of its crawlspace to test its protagonist’s devotion to his dream, Ferrara stays mostly indoors, providing a panoramic, sketchy, lovingly photographed view of the people who keep it running. The plot of the film, which hinges mostly on Dafoe trying to find his winning lottery ticket, is less important (or arresting) than the offbeat performances that Ferrara brings out of nearly all his actors, not to mention their asses. Asia Argento bitches out her fellow co-workers before strutting her stuff on stage and making out with a dog; Matthew Modine is a slightly effete womanizer whose villainy is undermined by his lust; and Ferrara indulges Bob Hoskins’ trademark throaty yell to hilarious effect. In one scene, a stripper’s husband discovers her true vocation, and Hoskins attempts to assuage him by replying that “it’s an art form, we do it clean here.” Maybe so, but nothing is ever too serious in this movie, and thinking about it in relation to Cassavetes’ masterpiece reminded me of Werner Herzog’s “remake” of Ferrara’s own Bad Lieutenant, which borrowed a few of that film’s basic themes and explored them more through comedy than tragedy. Dafoe’s performance in this film is similar to Nicolas Cage’s in wearing its wildly mixed emotions for all to see, culminating in a one-take monologue that alone makes the film worth seeing. Until that point he’s hard to take seriously, but is great fun to watch; he even sings an entire number, which the credits say Ferrara wrote. It’s possible Dafoe is a stand-in for Ferrara himself and his career-long dedication to the fringes of urban society. He’s made many flawed but fascinating films, at once gazing at NYC through a cheeky, empowering B-movie lens (Ms. 45), and going on to fashion his own gritty, idiosyncratic gangster saga (King of New York). The sleazy vibe that oozes through many of them is here at its most recognizable, but also its most celebratory; the fact that we hardly get to see New York isn’t an issue. These characters may not be deep, but at least they know what they want. No one else would make a movie like this today—at least not one with a big, booty-shaped heart at the center.