Romeo Is Bleeding Movie Trailer. In the most recent phase of an unusual career, the director Peter Medak turned to film noir with surprising success. Best remembered for “The Ruling Class,” his wildly eccentric 1972 comedy starring Peter O’Toole, Mr. Medak had languished for a while in Hollywood (“Zorro the Gay Blade,” “The Men’s Club”) before resurfacing with two dark, quintessentially English crime stories.
Both “The Krays” (1990) and “Let Him Have It” (1991) told bitter, deadly, sardonic tales set off by Mr. Medak’s newly hardboiled direction. And both displayed a real noir nihilism, perhaps because the film maker was obliged to reinvent his form. Bound by true stories and confined to English row houses and seedy nightclubs, both these films became as visually distinctive as they were temperamentally tough. They were made without condescension. That is not the case with “Romeo Is Bleeding,” Mr. Medak’s latest foray into noir terrain.
With a Hungarian-born director and an English star (Gary Oldman), “Romeo Is Bleeding” works overtime to establish the kind of extreme seriousness that carries a satirical edge. Every ceiling fan and jaded voice-over announces that this film is steeped in Hollywood memorabilia, to the point where its own personality seems needlessly secondhand. “Romeo Is Bleeding” has a good cast, abundant flash and a lot of shallow jokeyness, but its surface attractions pale long before the story is over. And by that time, the film’s dissipated hero has gone bonkers and its super-sadistic heroine has removed her own arm.
Part of what makes “Romeo Is Bleeding” such a novelty item is its women, both off and on the screen. The screenplay is by Hilary Henkin, whose goal seems to have been out-Hammetting Hammett, and whose better moments are well worth remembering. (“There was always a little daylight between his dreams and his wallet.”) In a comparably lurid vein, the film immortalizes Mona Demarkov (Lena Olin), the “Queen of Queens rackets” and a woman who never met a garter belt she didn’t like. Mona’s lingerie flaunting appears to be one of the film’s main raisons d’etre.
The effort to show off Ms. Olin in a Sharon Stone role is a big success, up to a point. (The point comes when she loses the arm.) Ms. Olin looks great, and she’s a lot more fiery in this hit-woman’s role than she has been when trying, in tamer films, to be nice. But otherwise, “Romeo Is Bleeding” adds up to much less than the sum of its parts. Mr. Medak fared better in the service of true, wrenching stories than he does under the spell of this material’s desperate fancifulness. The joke isn’t much of a joke to begin with, and it wears thin.
Among the valuable elements of “Romeo Is Bleeding” are Mr. Oldman’s uncanny performance as a slang-spouting American. An English actor who can sound like more of a New Yorker than Annabella Sciorra is indeed a master craftsman. Mr. Oldman plays a cop named Jack Grimaldi, a hopeless romantic who is not quite satisfied living with Natalie (Ms. Sciorra), his wife. (Mr. Medak, whose visual style is best at its most icy and unsparing, indicates this with shots showing how the Grimaldis’ tiny backyard overlooks a cemetery.)
So Jack has a secret life, one that incorporates sweet, dim Sheri (Juliette Lewis). Like Mona, Sheri establishes her character traits with the help of the right underclothes. For all its promise, and for all the brittle beauty of Dariusz Wolski’s cinematography, “Romeo Is Bleeding” eventually collapses under the weight of its violent affectations. But along the way, Mark Isham’s brooding, jazzy score adds a lot to the film’s superficial allure.
Romeo Is Bleeding (1994)
Directed by: Peter Medak
Starring: Gary Oldman, Lena Olin, Annabella Sciorra, Juliette Lewis, Roy Scheider, Larry Joshua, David Proval, Victoria Bastel, Will Patton, James Cromwell
Screenplay by: Hilary Henkin
Production Design by: Stuart Wurtzel
Cinematography by: Dariusz Wolski
Film Editing by: Walter Murch
Costume Design by: Aude Bronson
Set Decoration by: Beth A. Rubino
Art Direction by: W. Steven Graham
Music by: Mark Isham
MPAA Rating: R for strong violence, language and sexuality.
Distributed by: Gramercy Pictures
Release Date: February 4, 1994
Views: 281
