Light Sleeper

Johnny LaTour, played by Willem Dafoe in Paul Schrader's 1991 Light Sleeper, is the kind of drug dealer who keeps a diary inflected with Kierkegaard, avoids the white powder himself, and urges his more abject customers into treatment, recommending that they enroll at Hazelden in Minnesota.  He has a soft spot for an ex-wife that he spots one evening in a photogenic rainstorm on the deliriously photogenic streets of Manhattan.  He is sentimental, kindhearted, a man who claims good intentions while carelessly destroying those around him.  He doesn't know how to use a gun and dowses himself liberally in cologne purchased duty-free at the airport -- presumably, to hide the stench of mortality.  In short, LaTour is a chimera, a creature that exists only in Paul Schrader's imagination and, of course, a surrogate for the director himself.  Light Sleeper is an entertaining example of self-plagiarism or, perhaps, even self-parody, although I think Schrader is too relentlessly earnest for the latter -- it's a collage of themes and scenes from other Schrader scripts, a mash-up of Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, Hard Core, and most obviously, American Gigolo with a little bit of Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ thrown in for a good measure:  the gaunt Dafoe sprawls on a floor arms outstretched and naked, crucified for Ed Lachmann's camera.  All of this stuff is pretty good in the original and not bad when repeated; Schrader reminds me a little of Handel recycling his greatest hits one after another. 

The film's plot is simple enough, a reprise of American Gigolo.  Dafoe is a prosperous, initially amoral, drug dealer or "DD" as he calls himself.  He hustles around Manhattan in a limousine, seated in Byronic and lonely splendor, on-call as a cocaine delivery boy for various long-term clients.  All transactions are cash and the film luxuriates in filming stacks of hundred dollar bills.  Drugs, it seems, are even more profitable than sex was for Richard Gere.  Like Gere's gigolo, Dafoe's character works for a woman, a no-nonsense entrepreneur played by the very pretty and effective Susan Sarandon.  Sarandon is the mother figure in a perverse family with two siblings, Dafoe's Johnny LaTour and a homosexual man that she blithely calls a "fag" -- he apparently services the gay clients in the Manhattan demi monde.  Schrader's imagination was formed by old Westerns and the film has a slight flavor of John Ford -- Sarandon's mother-hen drug dealer yearns to go straight and, in fact, there is a sense in which she is looking for one big score on which launch her putative cosmetics business.  She's like the aging shootist who yearns to hang up her six-gun.  (There is also some talk of the closing of glamorous Old West -- here symbolized by the incursion of crack cocaine into the drug business; presumably, this means African American influence on this frontier; however this racist subtext is never explored)  Johnny meets his ex-wife, a former junkie who is now straight. This woman has come to New York to attend at the death bed of her mother.  When she sees Dafoe with her comatose mother, her heart, previously closed to Dafoe, melts.  There is an elaborate sex scene filmed in Lachmann's best Rainer Werner Fassbinder style:  lurid colors, a huge backdrop of Vermeer's "Lacemaker" behind the bed, vast bouquets of flower shot through heavily tinted filters, complex compositions involving mirrors -- it's ravishing and looks like The Bitter  Tears of Petra von Kant.  (In general Lachmann's photography is a master class in neo-Noir moodiness -- look into the corners of the rooms:  they are exquisite still lives worthy of Chardin.)  Dafoe's ex-wife realizes that the drug dealer is toxic to her and renounces him.  This doesn't stop her from becoming sexually involved with one of Dafoe's Euro-Trash clients, a man named Tice, who serves as the film's villain.  (Tice is like a Germanic version of Andy Warhol; he banally adjudicates bad experiences with exhausted ejaculation:  "What a nightmare!")  When LaTour encounters his strung-out girlfriend in Tice's penthouse, she is mortified and pitches herself off the parapet of the apartment. LaTour is enraged, acquires a gun, and goes forth to seek revenge. 

This is all pretty ludicrous but brilliantly filmed.  Schrader and Lachmann are prone to dissolves:  Dafoe's brooding features melt into dark city streets highlighted with neon -- he is a creature of the night and the city is within him as he is within the city.  (It is impossible to imagine him near a tree let alone in some environment outside of Manhattan.)  The film's morality is obtuse -- Schrader wants us to admire LaTour's dogged romanticism, his pursuit of his ex-wife, and his Old West resolve to strap on his gun and do what a man's gotta do at the climax.  But the guy is a low-life drug dealer and, ultimately, it's problematic that Schrader asks us to identify with this character.  Dafoe does a good job, although sometimes his skull-like face seems to morph into Christopher Walken.  He is shot as a pale, wormy figure, conspicuously flabby in the upper arms and with a hacksaw grin of bad, yellow teeth.  But, of course, he's endearing and we are supposed to like him.  Sarandon is excellent.  At the end, she wholly debunks the film's climactic gunfight, yet another version of Travis Bickel slaughtering the bad guys at the end of Taxi Driver.  When a couple of thugs draw guns and points them at her, she screams a couple of obscenities, walks up to the nonplussed hoodlums and simply slaps the firearms out of their hands.  "No one draws a gun on me," she shouts.  Then, she goes out into the hall, screams "fire" and triggers all the alarms.  This is the best thing in the movie and I wish that Schrader had not felt the need to have his goons re-arm themselves so that Willem Dafoe can laboriously blow them into perdition.