Amos Gitai’s documentary about workers in Thailand, with an extended side-trip to Bahrain, features interviews with prostitutes, a former film censor who recruits workers, a company owner showing off his house, the manager of a luxury hotel, and others. A particularly strong aspect of Gitai’s informative, antitouristic approach is his original approach to sound recording and sound mixing; his densely layered sound track nearly always encompasses parts of the surrounding environment that are not visible on-screen, so that one’s perceptions of the various milieus being explored are constantly expanded beyond the borders of the frame (1984). (JR) Read more
Martin Donovan’s second feature (1988), set in Buenos Aires, is an exciting if occasionally overblown thriller centered on the relationship between a repressed cinephile (Colin Firth) and a charismatic American (Hart Bochner) who share a flat, a number of neighbors in the same building (including a lonely wife, two English ladies, and an abused transvestite), and a string of serial murders that seem linked to the Argentinean death squads. As various as all these strands may appear to be, Donovan ties them together into a provocative and haunting psychological horror story laced with black humor that is especially suggestive about the ambiguous profile of the American abroad. Baroque in style, with echoes of Hitchcock and Polanski (among others), and an impressively aggressive score by Elia Cmiral, this is a powerful, pungent work that shouldn’t be missed. (JR) Read more
