Word: reves
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Windows on the World. Baum now runs a promising, quasi-postmodern creation called Aurora, where eclectic new French-American cooking prevails. Among the better menu choices are the roasted pigeon with sweet garlic, lime-broiled guinea fowl and a pungent lemon hazelnut torte. Enthusiastic over what he calls le reve americain (the American dream), Pangaud says, "I love the open-mindedness of this country. You can try much more than in Europe with food and with your life. Besides, there are too many expensive restaurants in Paris for the number of customers...
...reading, Reve finds himself followed by a devastatingly poised, icy blonde with a film camera. When she propositions him. Reve accepts, just as coolly--because he has nothing better to do, or because he doesn't like hotels, the depth of his motivation is anyone's guess. The fling picks up momentum only when Gerard finds a picture of the young man he'd missed on the previous day on Christine's desk. The man, it turns out, is her long-distance lover Reve is elated: megalomania becomes monomania, as he schemes and manipulates Christine into inviting...
...EARLY SCENE, in which Reve has just left the club with Christine, alerts us--in case the spider hadn't--that something is amiss. Maneuvering her flashy little sports car with suicidal abandon. Christine spirits Reve through a metaphysical traffic jam of omens, from bloody accidents to a neon sign that spells "spider" in Dutch on the front of her house. Later that night, Reve finds himself tormented with particularly nasty castration dreams that feature Christine wielding a pair of scissors in her blue-painted claws. Lest we dismiss the scene as a chuckle at Reve's castration complex...
...stream of dreams and warnings builds to a sort of surreal slapstick that makes it difficult to see why Reve doesn't just get the hell out of Christine's beachhouse inferno. He is, infact, put in the position of playing straight man to all the outrageous "clues" the plot offers Krabbe's magnificent portrayal of a very un-straight obsession keeps the character from being an imbecile, even given the vacuous tackiness of Herman, Christine's lover and his object of lust. Herman turns out to be a German plumbing contractor who not only looks, but sounds, like...
...stream of omens and fantasies, while entertaining in itself, is too clearly just that. We're never left in doubt as to where Reve's psyche--however fevered--ends and reality begins, leading to a progression of events that is studied and deliberate; there are no tricks of perspective, no phantasmagory in Verhoeven's high-tech entertainment...