CLAIRE DOLAN
by Kevin Koehler
We open on images of urban architecture. Skyscrapers, high-rise
apartments, covered in opaque glass and shot at angles that serve
less to show us what lies inside these buildings than to reflect
the world without.
This world is an ominous place and few people are made more aware
of it than the titular Claire Dolan.
A Manhattan prostitute who caters to sorry, white-collar johns,
Claire has a moment of clarity when her elderly mother dies under
mysterious, unresolved circumstances. For Claire, intimacy has always
been a carefully-constructed illusion she creates for her clients. "You're
not like other men," she's fond of saying. "You're beautiful," they're
found of replying. Neither is entirely true (no disrespect to deceased
actress Katrin Cartlidge, who some will remember from noteworthy
performances in Breaking the Waves or Naked).
When relationships are measured in dollars and every human exchange
comes with cost, it's no surprise when Claire only has a passerby
on the street to confide "I just buried my mother." The
stranger offers little comfort. Claire attempts to restart her life
across the Hudson River but ultimately fails to outrun her past -
they have a way of catching up to people and hers comes in the form
of her pimp (Colm Meaney, overjoyed to be playing something other
than an Irish gangster). Along the way, she meets and ultimately
falls in love with sensitive taxi driver, Elton (Vincent D'Onofrio,
in what future generations will term his "svelte period"),
playing wink-wink with a film archetype made famous by Scorsese and
De Niro. Claire later seeks emotional consolation via the bearing
of a child - it's unclear if this is a repudiation of her former
lifestyle or the ultimate indulgence in it. We're left to judge this
for ourselves.
The film is sexual but not sexy. The only time we can reasonably
certain of Claire's pleasure in the sex act is during a tryst with
Elton after he agrees to help pay off her debts. Like Austrian filmmaker
Michael Haneke (The Piano Teacher, Cache, Funny Games),
writer/director Lodge Kerrigan is consistently indicting the audience
of its crimes (remember those reflective surfaces of the opening).
Just as Claire cannot experience true intimacy, neither can we. The
camera is a voyeur, frequently recording Claire's passionless sex
with johns from across the room, around corners, through the crack
of a door left ajar, and if we still didn't get it, reflected on
a blackened television screen. All the while, she has the bored/wounded
look of an aging porn star, her eyes - those windows of the soul
- serving less to show us what lies within than reflect the world
without.
Interesting footnote: Lodge Kerrigan would later direct a film called In
God's Hands that had to be abandoned after severe damage to
the negative (it starred Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard).
Steven Soderbergh was a producer on that film, as he would be on
Kerrigan's incredible picture, Keane. That film is available
on DVD with cuts by both director and producer, an interesting
exercise in filmschoolishness.
© Pretentious Musings. This review may not be reprinted, in
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