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| Angela Bassett and Ralph Fiennes in Strange Days |
Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett, Juliette Lewis, Tom Sizemore, Michael Wincott, Vincent D'Onofrio, Glenn Plummer, Brigitte Bako, Richard Edson, William Fichtner, Josef Sommer. Screenplay: James Cameron, Jay Cocks. Cinematography: Matthew F. Leonetti. Production design: Lilly Kilvert. Film editing: Howard E. Smith, James Cameron. Music: Graeme Revell.
Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days contains one of the most painful and disturbing scenes I've ever witnessed. In it a woman, through a perversion of technology, is forced to experience her rape through the eyes and sensations of her rapist. The film was a box office failure, usually ascribed to poor marketing, but I suspect that word-of-mouth about that scene has a lot to do with keeping audiences away. It makes the protagonist, played well by Ralph Fiennes, vomit when he experiences it through a virtual reality recording device that plays back not only the visual but also the physical sensations that the recorder experienced while wearing it. Bigelow was the right director for the film, conceived by her then-partner James Cameron. Making such a scene virtually demands that a woman be responsible for it, but Bigelow is also a master of the hyperactive thriller, which Strange Days wants to be when it's not being so outrageously transgressive. It's well-acted, particularly by Fiennes and Angela Bassett, and it builds to a smashing, noisy climax on New Year's Eve at the dawn of the millennium, but it's overlong, and to my mind its over-the-top violence dissipates the points it wants to make about police brutality, racial injustice, and the dangers of invasive technology.
