Claire Dolan
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DVD details
Actor: Vincent D'Onofrio, Colm Meaney Katrin CartlidgeDVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo; French (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, NTSC, Widescreen
Running Time: 95 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-02-21
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: New Yorker
DVD Reviews of Claire Dolan
DVD Review: sexual but not sexy
Summary: 4 Stars
We open on images of urban architecture. Skyscrapers, high-rise apartments, covered in opaque glass and shot at angles that serve less to show us what lies inside these buildings than to reflect the world without.
This world is an ominous place and few people are made more aware of it than the titular Claire Dolan.
A Manhattan prostitute who caters to sorry, white-collar johns, Claire has a moment of clarity when her elderly mother dies under mysterious, unresolved circumstances. For Claire, intimacy has always been a carefully-constructed illusion she creates for her clients. "You're not like other men," she's fond of saying. "You're beautiful," they're found of replying. Neither is entirely true (no disrespect to deceased actress Katrin Cartlidge, who some will remember from noteworthy performances in Breaking the Waves or Naked).
When relationships are measured in dollars and every human exchange comes with cost, it's no surprise when Claire only has a passerby on the street to confide "I just buried my mother." The stranger offers little comfort. Claire attempts to restart her life across the Hudson River but ultimately fails to outrun her past - they have a way of catching up to people and hers comes in the form of her pimp (Colm Meaney, overjoyed to be playing something other than an Irish gangster). Along the way, she meets and ultimately falls in love with sensitive taxi driver, Elton (Vincent D'Onofrio, in what future generations will term his "svelte period"), playing wink-wink with a film archetype made famous by Scorsese and De Niro. Claire later seeks emotional consolation via the bearing of a child - it's unclear if this is a repudiation of her former lifestyle or the ultimate indulgence in it. We're left to judge this for ourselves.
The film is sexual but not sexy. The only time we can reasonably certain of Claire's pleasure in the sex act is during a tryst with Elton after he agrees to help pay off her debts. Like Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke (The Piano Teacher, Cache, Funny Games), writer/director Lodge Kerrigan is consistently indicting the audience of its crimes (remember those reflective surfaces of the opening). Just as Claire cannot experience true intimacy, neither can we. The camera is a voyeur, frequently recording Claire's passionless sex with johns from across the room, around corners, through the crack of a door left ajar, and if we still didn't get it, reflected on a blackened television screen. All the while, she has the bored/wounded look of an aging porn star, her eyes - those windows of the soul - serving less to show us what lies within than reflect the world without.
Interesting footnote: Lodge Kerrigan would later direct a film called In God's Hands that had to be abandoned after severe damage to the negative (it starred Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard). Steven Soderbergh was a producer on that film, as he would be on Kerrigan's incredible picture, Keane. That film is available on DVD with cuts by both director and producer, an interesting exercise in filmschoolishness.
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