'R Xmas (2001)

"This is what you get for making house calls." - Bill Hartford (Eyes Wide Shut) Abel Ferrara directs "R Xmas". Ignored upon release in the West, the film would top several "best of the year" polls in France, and would be heavily praised by several Cahiers Du Cinema writers.The plot? Dreo de Matteo and Lillo Brancato play a Latino husband and wife team living in New York City. They lead a double life, alternating between their upscale Manhattan apartment (eerily similar to the Hartford's apartment in "Eyes Wide Shut"; did Kubrick's location scouts photocopy a similar place?), and a run-down inner city rent-a-room, where they cut, wrap and push cocaine. Like "Eyes Wide Shut", these two apartments - or halves of the couple's life - occupy the same Mobius Strip. The couple wine and dine and fraternise with sophistos on one hand, but slum it and hang out with street urchins, hoodlums and gangsters on the other. They push to have the best toys, gifts and Ivy League education for their young daughter, but must engage in all manners of debauchery to maintain her sanitised life. Privilege, then, is seen to come at a cost.Much of the film contrasts the couple's provincial dialects and street slang with their pretence at having escaped the streets. They're not social climbers, or even social pretenders, so much as agents shuttlecocking back and forth between poverty and yuppie money. The film's tone does the same, sleazy and vulgar on one hand, but tender and poignant on the other. Matteo and Brancato, a couple of unconventional, riveting and well cast actors, themselves exude warmth, selflessly concerned about their little family unit, even as they spew obscenities and cut coke.Like "Eyes Wide Shut", Christmas is the setting. Drug trading appears to be qualitatively no different from any other business, transactions are the raison d'etre of all interactions and the film delights in clashing its wholesome festive ambiance with B movie grit. The point's not that our lead couple lead a "double life", but that everything has a repugnant underside (hence the "R Xmas" slang title - the X rated, the shameful), the two "sides" of the Mobius Strip inextricable, day facilitating night and vice versa. Shades of Lynch ("Inland Empire", "Mulholland Drive", "Lost Highway"), Cronenberg ("Existenz", "A History of Violence", "Eastern Promises"), Pasolini ("Salo"?), Godard ("Weekend" et al) and Kubrick (everything post "Clockwork").The "Eyes Wide Shut" parallels continue. Ferrara's film, like Kubrick's, is wholly preoccupied with costs. Ferrara mirrors the "designed scarcity" of consumer goods (trendy dolls, toys, goods) with the couple's in-house drug market. And just as the couple's product ruins the lives of those on the streets, so to does this outside violence leak back into their wannabe-bourgeois lives. It's not that the couple can't cut themselves off from the streets – their aim - but that they're not wealthy enough yet to do so. Their daughter will, though, mother and father's violence like a perverse Christmas gift to her. She's destined for cosy isolation.The film is somewhat autobiographical; Ferrara was a notorious crack-head for over a decade. Unlike Kubrick, though, he focuses on a smaller slice of the social strata: the lower and wannabe-bourgeois classes. The film's less interested in power as a a kind of established social framework than it is in B movie hysteria, which plays to Ferrara's strengths.Stylistically the film differs from early Ferrara. In interviews Ferrara states that its bizarre lighting and camera work was an unintentional result or byproduct of the film's small budget and rushed shoot, which necessitated the use of simple long shots, less coverage than usual and an almost documentary look. Ferrara also chooses to shoot bilingual dialogue (Spanish presented without subtitles) and refuses to juice up his film's casual tempo with thriller conventions. The film manages the rare task of neither condemning the drug trade or romanticising/poeticizing it, thanks largely to Matteo and Brancato. Their characters are pragmatic, vulgarly earnest, but there is sentimentality in their Christmas dream to acquire a doll for their daughter. Hard work, love, family, sacrifice and other treacly all-American values are espoused, but the film undermines even as it evokes the "Christmas spirit".As with all of Ferrara's films, the best moments are those in which nothing much happens: Matteo and Brancato looking at each other, driving in silence, distant shots of powder pushers pushing product or daughters walking with their fathers. What's good about "R Xmas", and what typically separates late Ferrara from early Ferrara, is that almost the entire film is similarly underplayed. "R Xmas" also features some moody nighttime and low-light photography, though such an aesthetic is beginning to be supplanted by the ether-real of digital cameras. The film features another horrendous performance by Ice-T.Some have criticised the film for analogising the commercialisation of illegal drugs and Christmas. The idea is that parallels between consumerism/materialism and cocaine dealing are trite, and that while depicting the narcotics trade as merely another capitalist avenue for enrichment is not necessarily "not correct", it is also not true that "trade" is inherently damaging. This is a whole other issue – the underside of liberal democracy and "money" itself (you can drag simple physics/biology into this as well: money is essentially energy, subject to entropy and thermodynamic laws) - and one which strikes to the core of how we run and misunderstand our own lives and actions, but Ferrara is uninterested, and is more a madcap neo-neo-Realist than didactic filmmaker.The film begins and ends with text crawls about NYC mayors David Dinkins and Rudolph Giuliani, epitomising Manhattan's evolution from seductive gutter to Disneyfied, gentrified tourist attraction. Matteo and Brancato are of the former; they're daughter's Mickey Mouse Club through and through.8.5/10 – See Olivier Assayas' "Demonlover", "Boarding Gate" and "Summer Hours". Worth two viewings.

RXmas--which I have heard pronounced as R Christmas--is an intriguing entry in Ferrara's career. I have to admit, I much prefer the hyperslick megaviolent insanity of King of New York and the scuzzy Method Acting delirium of movies like Bad Lieutenant, Dangerous Game, and The Funeral, and the drab experimentalism of New Rose Hotel and The Addiction to this exercise in extreme realism. But I admired and respected the achievement. Drea Dematteo is very powerful, very vulnerable, very real. Her desire to rescue her husband from the clutches of mysterious kidnappers is fascinating to watch. Ice-T, who gets so little respect as an actor and has been condemned these days to Law and Order spinoffs and Leprachaun sequels, is tight, mean, scary, and inspirational. Lillo Brancato gives a very truthful performance as the husband. He doesn't play it as a moronic machofried action hero: he's just a dad, a workaday stiff, trying to provide for his family in the best way he knows how. RXmas is seemingly the beginning of a new cycle of films, presumably dealing with New York City and the business of drug dealing. Somehow, I doubt this new cycle will ever be brought to fruition. RXmas was yet another megaflop/now you see it now you don'ter from Ferrara. Too bad. American cinema could use some more of his scuzz, his hyperslick insanity, his quotidian realism. I have this theory that most people who see his movies think he's European (Italian, possibly French). He is, however, one of the great American filmmakers. Hopefully, more of this cycle will be revealed.

Our Christmas (2001) was a highly underrated film from street level director Abel Ferrara. Instead of making a sell-out movie like all of the other directors do, Ferrara sticks to his guns and makes the kind of films that he wants to do. Loosely based upon a true story, Ferrara takes this simple tale about a innocent family living a double life and makes it into a compelling urban character driven drama that's filled with flesh and bone people instead of paper cut-outs.An young family that lives the good life has a shameful secret. They like to deal dope on the side to support their high class living. The movie takes place during the late 80's to the early 90's. Police corruption in New York City was at a all time high. So many of the cops were on the take. One group of cops didn't like the couple and their crew squeezing them out of the heroin business. Ice-T co-stars as an officer who tries to convince the wife (Drea Matteo) to leave the drug trade and do whatever it takes to keep Hubby away from it as well. Not convinced, they kidnap him and the wife has 24 hours to come up with a large sum of money to obtain his release.After receiving a reality check from Ice-T, Drea must come face with the fact that she has wasted her life and is better than the typical dope slinger. When Hubby is released retribution is in order. The crooked cops are all apprehended and the loser responsible for the entire mess is done away with. But really, are their any lessons to be learned by all of the main characters? Abel Ferrara leaves all of the questions open ended. He makes you think about what happened to everyone. This is not a violent soap opera filled with nonsensical gun play. It's a street level drama that pulls no punches and not everyone will appreciate it.Highly recommended.

The whole movie seemed to suffer from poor editing - every scene seemed to take forever to unfold and when they did, I felt like I had waited a long time for very little to happen. I guess I missed the whole point of the movie - either that or there wasn't one.