Word: cured
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...Britain, many industrialists and financial analysts voiced doubts as to whether the medicine was strong enough to cure Britain's deep-seated economic ills. In a larger world sense, the far more important question was whether the dollar would show signs of weakening. At week's end the evidence clearly indicated that it would hold firm...
Rooks' film, though visual poetry of a sort, is equally a selfish attempt at preserving past experience, the act having therapeutic overtones in this case. Chappaqua is Rooks' autobiography, the story of a 27-year-old alcoholic and drug addict who enters a private Parisian sanitarium to take a cure. The film juxtaposes the reality of the sanitarium, its doctors and attendants, with Rooks' drug hallucinations during the tortuous process of the cure, also with memories of past drug visions while still a full-time addict...
...completion of Rooks' analysis and cure, he felt that making a film about it would be the perfect way to enact a final exorcism of the demons, rid his mind and body once-and-for-all of drugs and liquor. Backed by a family fortune which had previously sustained his drug habit, Rooks cast himself in the lead part (giving himself a pseudonym, Russell Harwick), and went to work in 16mm, deciding 6 months later to do it up proud and shoot professionally in 35mm. Only a few of the original shots remain, indicated by a black strip of masking...
Throughout, the dramatic situation underlines and motivates the visual tour de force: he enters the sanitarium, escapes to Paris where bogie-man William S. Burroughs supplies him with drugs, re-enters the sanitarium upon discovery, and finishes the cure. The film ends brilliantly with two scenes of Harwick--cured--leaving the sanitarium, expressing both the hallucinations of leaving the must have been the final visions of an almost-cured Rooks (he exits by helicopter and waves goodbye to himself, standing on the highest gable of the building), and the simpler reality of his actual exit by chauffeur-driven automobile...
...basic plot points are clear enough so that Rooks need not specify detail: we never learn the details of his cure, the motivations or interpretations of his behavior during drug withdrawal, or whether the recurring people in his visions actually exist. When Rooks does add detail, it is always relevant; talking about his life at 18-years-old, he describes himself as a creation of 42nd Street and American movies, this partially explaining two drug experiences where Rooks pictures himself as Al Capone and as Dracula (two sequences film critics have incorrectly found self-conscious and arbitrary...