Released by Gramercy, after winning the top award at the Montreal Festival, the film noir Kalifornia was dismissed by most critics and failed at the box-office.
Unfortunately, a similar fate was also met by Gramercy’s other film noir that year, Peter Medak’s Romeo Is Bleeding.
Like most of today’s hip filmmakers, writer Hilary Henkin perceives noir as a visual style, not as a tonal sensibility, or distinct mode of storytelling.
Thus, Romeo Is Bleeding has all the familiar trappings–inky photography, hard-boiled ironies–but the arch script panders to the audience’s sense of knowingness, shuffling the cliches of the genre to an even greater extreme than found in the Joel and Ethan Coen’s earlier features,
British actor Gary Oldman plays Jack, a corrupt cop in the mold of Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, workimng both sides of the law. Amoral more than immoral, he tips off the mob as to the location of witnesses that he’s supposed to protect.
He lies to his wife (Annabelle Sciorra) about his mistress (Juliette Lewis), and to both of them about the other women in his life.
Motivated by lust and greed, Jack is baffled when the mob boss (Roy Scheider) orders him to murder a seductively wild Russian hit woman, named Mona Demarkov (played by the naturally sexy Lena Olin).
Directed with excessive stylistic tricks, Romeo Is Bleeding proved to be offensive to most critics, and to the few viewers who actually saw it. From the ridiculous voiceover narration to the incomprehensible plot contortions, it was an hermetic feature, with no linkage to the real world.
All the cues derive from genre conventions, which the film both misunderstands and lacerates.
Lena Olin gave an over-the-top performance as the alternately shrewd and bestial mob woman, and a scene in which she escapes a car while wounded is not just campy but preposterous.
Movieish to the point of extinction, Romeo is Bleeding is composed of a series of hollow decorative set pieces, lacking much substance.
