Still from Pheonix |
Daliah, a waitress on the run from her wannabe-rapist,
roams the cemetary every day, to look for her sister whom everyone
believes to be dead, though her body was never found. Her only lead is
cemetary worker Sam, a weirdp who can only have sex with his stickdoll -
which might or might not be the key to the secret of Daliah' sister. Sam
is warned of Daliah by Necra, though Necra is kind of weird herself, as
she likes to spend her time in bodybags in the cemetary's morgue, and
might or might not be dead. By and by, light is shed on what happened to
Daliah's sister - she actually poured gasoline all over herself and set
herself on fire after her dad raped her, something Daliah has witnessed
herself but has supressed for the longest time (and she might or might not
have killed her father becase of it). But what is Daliah's cartharsis is
Sam's demise, as he kis unable to distinguish between his stickdoll, whom
eh really loves, and Daliah's dead sister, and in the end, he himself
takes a gasoline shower and sets himself on fire, just to be closer to her
... At least, the above is what I read out of Phoenix,
you might come to a different conclusion, because it is not a narrative
film in the traditional sense but a carefully woven network of
associations between everything and everything else, somewhere along the
lines of Lynch and Godard, Jodorowsky and Fellini. but even in his first
feature, Tony Marsiglia proves himself a clever enough filmmaker to not
make the movie for the sake of itself but turn it into an entertaining
piece of weirdness, a film that might not be accessible to everyone, but
it doesn't lock itself away from its audience altogether either. Phoenix
isn't director Marsiglia's best film, it's a bit too much art for the
art's sake (as debut features often are) to succeed on every level,
but it's a fascinating experience nevertheless, and it shows a very
promising director, a promise Marsiglia later kept especially with movies
like Sinful and Suzie
Heartless.
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