The greatest movie. Too bad I only have it on VHS. Bauhaus' Bela Lugosi's Dead plays during the opening credits which is why I initially picked it up other than needing to partake of this Bowie/vampire combination. It perfectly sets of the drama of the song. Peter Murphy is sort of playing one of the crazy chimps featured later in the movie, which opens in a Slimelight sort of goth club circa the early 80s, which contains every example of why edgier punkier goth was so terribly cool, and fleeting and possible only then. The Lydia Lunch type vamping in the fog, Deneuve pulling her cigarette away from her red mouth -
The movie is essentially the faulty love story of Deneuve and Bowie, Deneuve and Sarandon, Deneuve and all of the companions she had known through the years. She is a kind of vampire, an ancient Mesopotamian queen or Egyptian priestess who has survived into 1980's Manhattan. At no point is the plot too stupid and flowery to accept, though. Everything falls apart for her in the end, an institution that seemed like it would never end. Deneuve is so epic and beautiful. This was the first time I ever saw her, and when I saw Repulsion a few years later, I could not believe that she could possibly have been around that long.
This was also the first time I heard Schubert's haunting and lovely Piano Trio in E Flat. Intense. Also Lakme.
