Cinema
Summer of Sam (18, selected cinemas)
Spike's elegy
Mark Steyn
In Billy Wilder's Seven Year Itch, Marilyn Monroe beats the New York heat by keep- ing her underwear in the freezer. In Spike Lee's new film, despite Mira Sorvino and co taking turns ducking into a restaurant freezer, there's no way to beat the heat, and everyone's underwear is steaming: Summer of Sam is heavy on summer, and light on Sam — the Son of Sam, that is, the big serial killer of the city's 1977 record heat wave. By the end of Lee's long hot movie about that long hot summer, as the sun fries the brains and frazzles the nerves, the Son of Sam's craziness is merely a mat- ter of degree.
It's different now. For better or worse, you couldn't make a film like this about Rudy Giuliani's New York, an antiseptic Disneyfied boutique with a lower crime rate than London and most other British cities. Lee's is an elegy to a mythic New York, and, at the end, he shovels all the clichés on top of each other: 'There are 8 million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them' — the lines come from the old Fifties cop show; they're delivered by Jimmy Breslin, playing himself as he has done for decades, the king of the old rub- ber-trunchebn city beat columnists; under- neath, Sinatra's singing about the city that doesn't sleep; the credits are splashed across the screen as headlines from the New York Post and the Daily News.
This being Spike Lee, it isn't one of the 8 million stories, but a good handful of them, spliced together against the backdrop of David ('Son of Sam') Berkowitz's killing spree. There's no pretence at range: it's located precisely among the black direc- tor's second favourite group of horny urban primitives, bluecollar Italian-Americans who strut like they're kings of the hill, top of the heap, apparently oblivious to the 'Dead End' sign that dominates their Bronx cul-de-sac. It's a raw tabloid film about raw tabloid people, with the kind of authentic directness most directors recoil from. When Lee's protagonists, Vinny and Dionna, are splitting up, they do so (in best 'Our Tune' tradition) to Thelma Houston's disco whimper 'Don't Leave Me This Way'. More importantly, although Vinny, like most Spike Lee characters, is little more than a hazy sketch — a pint-sized Travolta who services both the clients and the boss at his hair salon — as played by John Leguizamo he has a visceral drive that leaps out of the screen.
In the course of one of his extramarital backseat humpings, Vinny believes he's been seen by the killer. He takes this as a warning from God to cut back on the worn- anising, no easy task. Vinny is afflicted by the old madonna-whore complex. He's into oral, anal, every sort of sex every which way from any gal who'll take it. But he respects his wife too much to let her go in for this kind of thing, so instead he treats her like a lady and just gives her a quick, unsatisfying poke in the missionary position every now and again. Dionna, a waitress, dimly com- prehends some of this, and so her beauty has an ineffable sadness about it. Like Leguizamo, Mira Sorvino lifts the role into life, in a beautifully detailed performance complete with traffic-cop arm movements that will have anyone who's ever dated a woman from New York's outer boroughs pining irith nostalgia.
Because the murder victims are brunettes, the city's big-haired disco dames are flocking to the hair salons to bleach their tresses. When Dionna's protective menfolk insist she and Vinny can only go out clubbing if she wears a blonde wig, it adds a fantasy element to their relationship that eventually leads to Plato's Retreat, the gloomy coke'n'swingers club where, with a full nose of happy powder, Dionna lets go a little too much for Vinny's tastes. That's the film in a nutshell: it's not about the Son of Sam, it's what happens to a twitching, sweating fevered city when the unleashed fantasies of a serial killer accelerate the barely submerged fantasies of everyone else.
In some ways, Summer of Sam has the arc of a musical, a foul-mouthed hybrid of On the Town and West Side Story, where, instead of Sharks versus Jets, it comes down to disco versus punk. Lee, not for the first time, has hit on a brilliant idea and failed to do it justice. But so what? He still deserves credit for getting to it, and for assembling a superb cast — Bebe Neuwirth as the steely-hard salon madam, Patti LuPone as Ritchie's blousy mom. Stanley Kubrick took ten years to make Eyes Wide Shut and the result is a droning corpse marked only by a near total lack of any connection with human experience. Spike Lee shoots on the run, one film a year, with too much going on and the unfocused energy of a rampaging bull. But, if we have to have flawed masterpieces from celebrity auteurs, I'll take Lee any day.
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