Rosanna Arquette

  • Black Rainbow (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, September 2022) While Black Rainbow doesn’t work all that well at whatever it tries to be, there’s more to see here than the average 1980s supernatural horror film. Some of this added depth could be anticipated considering that the film is written and directed by noteworthy British director Mike Hodges, whose filmography is pleasantly eclectic and seldom dull. Here, he takes us to the Southern United States, where a medium (Rosanna Arquette) is the centrepiece of public shows in which she communicates with the dead and, perhaps more disturbingly, can anticipate violent deaths. Black Rainbow meddles with perceptions of time with a dual-timeline plot, examines the relation between violence and entertainment, and the predation of local industries on workers. This is all interesting to discuss—alas, the film itself isn’t quite as solid in its execution. It meanders during its opening hour, and can’t quite wrap up all of its plot thread into something that gives justice to its ambitions. Black Rainbow is certainly more intriguing than the standard slasher or monster stuff from the same era, but there’s a leap from that to enjoyment of the result that the film doesn’t take.

  • Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)

    Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, July 2019) There are two reasons to watch Desperately Seeking Susan, and both involve a bit of time travel. The first is a look at mid-1980s Madonna, before she started exposing herself (in all senses of the word) as an in-your-face sex symbol. It turns out that naturalistic Madonna was an incredibly cute performer, and some of the best moments of the film revolve around her smashing through the other character’s suburban lives. The other reason to watch the film has something to do with director Susan Seidelman’s portrayal of the mid-1980s New York City bohemian subculture, living at night in between the big buildings of the city. Rosanna Arquette is nominally the film’s protagonist, but she gets overshadowed, by design, by flashier performers—including early turns from John Turturro, Laurie Metcalf, Aidan Quinn (as a Byronian hero) and Steven Wright. The plot is refreshingly indescribable, belonging to the “one-damn-thing-after-another” school of screenwriting where weirdness and strange encounters (and dropped subplots) aren’t necessarily flaws to be corrected. Desperately Seeking Susan is not quite your usual bored-housewife, free-spirit film and that’s to its advantage. I only moderately liked it, but it’s certainly something else even today.

  • Nowhere to Run (1993)

    Nowhere to Run (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, June 2019) As dull and featureless as most Jean-Claude Van Damme movies of the early-1990s, Nowhere to Run doesn’t have much to offer to those who aren’t already fans of the actor. Here we have van Damme as an escaped ex-convict (but not the bad kind of ex-convict, obviously) taking up the protection of a widow and her two children against unscrupulous real-estate developers in a rural setting. To be fair, Robert Harmon’s direction does have a few moments, especially in the action sequences. Still, that’s not much—There’s more fun in chuckling at Belgian van Damme pretending to be from Québec, or seeing an unusually cute Rosanna Arquette go through the motions of a rote role. There really isn’t much to gnaw on in the movie, even for action-movie fans—it’s fairly dull stuff, with few surprises in execution. Van Damme was averaging nearly a movie and a half per year in the early 1990s (not an easy feat considering the rigours of an action role), and Nowhere to Run has the bad luck of being sandwiched between the far-better Universal Soldier and Hard Target. In other words, don’t worry too much if you forgot about it—you’re liable to forget about it moments after watching it again.