I Want You (1998)

On paper, I Want You has certain thematic and structural similarities to Atom Egoyan's masterpiece The Sweet Hereafter. Like Egoyan's film, I Want You includes a strong undercurrent of father/daughter incest. Like Egoyan's film, I Want You starts with vague, mysterious plot details and gradually peels away layer after layer of the mystery. A man arrives in a seacoast town in England after having been absent for many years. Why did he leave, and why has he returned? As the script progresses, we find out that he was in prison, then we find out that he killed someone in that very town. Another character is introduced. The local hairdresser is not willing to have sex with her boyfriend. She's not much interested in sex at all. What caused that?

The mysterious stranger seems to be her ex-boyfriend ...

 ... and so forth.

I've only scratched the surface of the revelations, and I've only touched on two of the four main characters. To reveal any more would spoil the basic mystery, which boils down to the identity of the murder victim. Even after that is known, many mysteries remain, and the behavior of some characters seems inexplicable until all the hole cards have been turned over. As each character's secrets are revealed, the lives of the characters seem to get more closely interwoven. Even when the film is over, certain elements of the plot resolution are implicit rather than explicit. I think I understand what happened in the past to drive the events which transpire in the present, but my understanding is based on several assumptions

In reality, the resemblance to Egoyan's film ends there. If The Sweet Hereafter is all well-scrubbed, polite, middle-class angst from credible people and situations, I Want You is all gritty and impoverished Anglotrash despair in some kind of post-modern fantasy world populated by typical offbeat film characters and gimmicks. (One of the main characters does not speak and, although he seems to live in dire poverty, owns all sorts of state-of-the-art bugging and taping equipment, which he uses for eavesdropping and recording the comings and goings of other characters, especially when they are engaged in anything sexual.) The Sweet Hereafter is elegant and glacial, photographed in stark whites with very little in the way of gimmicky lighting or colored filters, and it's backed by somber classical music. I Want You is all filters all the time, mostly blue hues indoors and amber hues outdoors, all backed by eerie punk and alternative rock. The director of I Want You is Michael Winterbottom, a man who is constantly experimenting with storytelling and cinematic forms. In his later film, 9 Songs, he filled virtually an entire screenplay with nothing except explicit sex and musical performances, all presented unedited and in real time. Sex and performances comprise perhaps 95% of the running time of that particular movie, with the rest consisting of a simple framing story in which a man looks back on the sex and concerts as a way of coming to terms with a key relationship in his past life. I Want You is sort of a harbinger of 9 Songs, in that it also has a brief framing story (which seems unnecessary to me) and also includes some full musical numbers in real time as well as some long, drawn-out sexual acts, albeit far less explicit ones than in the later movie. Sometimes the sexuality and music are combined, as when a stripper delivers a long private performance.

Although the mysteries of the plot are intriguing, and the film is certainly not a routine commercial effort, you may well find your mind wandering during the overlong digressions, or distracted by some of the arthouse mannerisms of the film. I had a problem with those elements, and I also have to invoke the Siskel Rule, because I didn't enjoy spending time with any of the four main characters, which in turn made it difficult to care about their past, present, or future activities. It's a film that I admired far more than I liked. The film does have some enthusiastic supporters, however, among those who look for alternative cinema experiences. For the rest of you: quite a bit of T&A.

 

Rachel Weisz

Labina Mitevska

Dee Dee Menta

More Weisz:

It just so happened that Mr Nude Celeb also did some captures of Rachel Weisz today, this time in Stealing Beauty

Rachel Weisz

Other Crap:

Movie Reviews:

Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe). White asterisk: expanded format. Blue asterisk: not mine. No asterisk: it probably sucks.

Here are some more clips from the 1993 video, Teasers. This one involves a couple of guys who find a wallet and use the poor slob's credit card to hire one stripper after another to come over and strut her stuff.  End of plot.  A bunch of B-movie gals did the stripping.

zipped .avis

• Annette Burger (1, 2, 3)
• Holly Spencer (1)
• Lauren Hays (1)
• Melinda Armstrong (1, 2)
• Melody Johnson (1)