Dressed to Kill / Бритва / Pulsions (1980)

×

Dressed to Kill / Бритва / Pulsions (1980)

Close

While taking a shower, Kate Miller, a middle-aged, sexually frustrated New York housewife, has a rape fantasy while her husband stands at the sink shaving. Later that day, after complaining to her psychiatrist Dr. Robert Elliott about her husband's pathetic performance in bed, she meets a strange man at a museum and returns to his apartment where they continue an adulterous encounter that began in the taxicab. Before she leaves his apartment, she finds papers which certify that the man has a venereal disease. Panicked, Kate rushes into the elevator, but has to return to his apartment when she realizes she's forgotten her wedding ring. When the elevator doors open, she's brutally slashed to death by a tall blonde woman wearing dark glasses. Liz Blake, a high-priced call girl, is the only witness to the murder and she becomes the prime suspect and the murderess's next target…

Она называет себя Бобби — высокая блондинка с ненасытным желанием убивать. Согласно записям доктора Эллиота, Бобби была его пациенткой, но перешла к другому врачу. Острая бритва, которая служит Бобби орудием убийства, была украдена из роскошного кабинета доктора Эллиота в престижном районе Нью-Йорка, в котором он ведет свою успешную психиатрическую практику.Очередной жертвой Бобби становится Кейт, другая пациентка доктора Эллиота, страдавшая от столь ярких эротических фантазий, что сама порой не могла отделить их от реальности. Лиз, девушка из высшего общества, случайно становится свидетельницей этого преступления, сразу же превратившись в объект преследования для убийцы и в подозреваемую для полиции. Только она сможет пролить свет на тайну высокой блондинки, если, конечно, ей удастся остаться в живых.

Une jeune femme a la vie sexuelle perturbee consulte un psychiatre. A la suite de cette entrevue, elle passe la nuit avec un inconnu rencontre dans un musee. Le lendemain, elle se fait assassiner par une mysterieuse blonde. Une call-girl qui a assiste au drame est traquee par la meurtriere…

×

Dressed to Kill / Бритва / Pulsions (1980)

Close

Few would argue that De Palma is an "original" filmmaker, but you can't say he doesn't crib from the best. Here, as in his previous films Sisters and Obsession, he's in full-on Hitchcock mode, serving up voyeuristic cinematography and more sudden twists than a particularly jarring rollercoaster. Take the opening scene, in which De Palma's camera drifts around a corner to reveal middle-aged housewife Kate (Angie Dickinson) implicitly pleasuring herself in the shower while staring at a man shaving in the bathroom mirror. Out of the steam, another man appears in the shower with her, covering her mouth with one hand and violently pawing at her crotch with the other. (In a pubic close-up, no less. Here's where the MPAA pitched a fit.) We cut suddenly from this implied rape and realize that it was just a fantasy Kate was mentally occupying herself with while having joyless sex with her bad-in-the-sack husband, whose lovemaking technique appears limited to rutting breathlessly like a hog.

×

Dressed to Kill / Бритва / Pulsions (1980)

Close

The situation is clear; Kate is frustrated and unfulfilled, and she later reveals as much while trying to seduce her psychologist, Dr. Elliot (Michael Caine), who admits an attraction to her but denies the temptation on ethical grounds. Bored and horny, Kate goes to the Metropolitan Museum, where she attracts the interest of a skeevy pick-up artist. In a bravura sequence that's free of dialogue and nearly ten minutes long—and which borrows heavily from Vertigo—De Palma stages an elaborate cat-and-mouse routine through the museum's labyrinthine corridors, with Kate initially avoiding the man, but then trying desperately to track him down for some anonymous afternoon delight.

×

Dressed to Kill / Бритва / Pulsions (1980)

Close

She gets some, all right, but that's not all she gets. (Mild-but-necessary spoilers ahead, so tread lightly or skip to the next paragraph.) Later, when Kate sneaks out of the man's apartment in the middle of the night, she's accosted and cut down in the elevator by a blond woman wearing sunglasses and wielding a straight-razor, a brutal and terrifying scene. The sole witness to the crime is high-class "Park Avenue whore" Liz Blake (Nancy Allen), who becomes the primary suspect of the cops—led by a pre-NYPD Blue Dennis Franz—and, to clear her name, starts her own investigation with help from Kate's computer-whiz teenaged son, Peter (Keith Gordon), a Harry Potter look-a-like whose main contribution to the plot is building a sweet time-lapse Super-8 rig that he uses to gather intel on the patients who come and go from Dr. Elliot's office. Meanwhile, Dr. Elliot starts to put the pieces together himself, believing that the murder was committed by "Bobbi," an angry ex-patient who left after Elliot wouldn't approve a gender- reassignment surgery.

×

Dressed to Kill / Бритва / Pulsions (1980)

Close

I'll say no more about the details of the story—there are several additional developments and twists that would be criminal to reveal—but I will say this: a compelling narrative is not the reason to watch Dressed to Kill. Implausibilities and logical gaps abound—how, for instance, would the killer know Kate was going to return to the man's apartment on the seventh floor to retrieve her wedding ring?—and the film's central conceit, which conflates transgenderism and mental illness, is both half-baked and hard to swallow. The acting isn't that great either. Angie Dickinson hams it up in her shower scene, Nancy Allen is okay but not particularly memorable as the proverbial hooker with a heart of gold, and Keith Gordon has about as much screen presence as the computer he's building in his basement. Michael Caine is his usually reliable self, but he seems severely underutilized.

×

Dressed to Kill / Бритва / Pulsions (1980)

Close

You watch Dressed to Kill because it's the work of a filmmaker who has impeccable control of his craft. Some auteurs like to make their directorial hand as invisible as possible, but not De Palma, who tends to flaunt his methods for generating suspense and emotion. (He gets a lot of flack for being too ostentatious at times, but I think he's an irrefutably great stylist.) The camerawork here is brilliant, using elaborate movements and off-kilter angles, long point-of-view Steadicam sequences and split-diopter shots that keep both the background and foreground of the frame in focus. As showy as this might sound, De Palma's skills are such that these techniques suck you into the world of the movie, rather than take you out of it. (One mark, I'd say, of a good director.) Of course, we can't ignore the other allure of Dressed to Kill—how loveably sleazy it is. The film takes place in the grimy New York of the late 1970s, when Times Square was still the province of seedy, neon-lit porn shops and where boombox- toting thugs wearing turtlenecks under splayed-collared shirts hung around on subway platforms looking goofily intimidating. The nude scenes have a sweetly cheesy upscale soft-core quality, with ogling looks at soap-lathered breasts—Angie Dickinson clearly had a body double—and long takes of Nancy Allen sneaking about Dr. Elliot's office in black stockings and garters. Here, the twin titillations of nudity and gore are more campy than arousing. De Palma is in on the joke and we're grinning along with him.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater (blu-ray.com)