Before Kathryn Bigelow, no one
could imagine surfers as Buddhist bank robbers, vampires as New West outlaws,
or Harrison Ford as a Communist submarine commander. The upcoming retrospective
of the director’s eight feature films at the Harvard Film Archive
(Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge,
617.495.4700) proves that great action movies can be great movies, no genre
caveats required.
Bigelow will be at the HFA in person on July 2 to screen The
Hurt Locker, her first new film in seven years. Early word is that
it might be the first high-profile Iraq War film that’s not merely an
unconvincing editorial; the story follows a team of American IED specialists
and gives Bigelow license to crank up the anxiety to the unbearable levels at
which she works best. But the series gets its start the day before with a
screening of her first film, The Loveless, a
hypnotically strange Willem Dafoe biker flick with the weirdest sex scene this
side of David Lynch (which is no coincidence, since its co-director was Monty
Montgomery, a sometimes-Lynch collaborator better known as the creepy cowboy in
Mulholland
Drive).
The HFA retrospective, which runs from July 1 through July 13,
reveals that Bigelow has made just about every kind of action movie:
action-horror (Near Dark), action-thriller (Blue
Steel), action-drama (K-19:
The Widowmaker), action-sci-fi (Strange Days), even
action-action (Point Break). For a female director whose films
are filled with so many men and even more explosions, she’s never made her
gender central to her movies; when her films work, it’s because of her talent
in subverting genre expectations, not gendered expectations.
Though Near Dark — a brooding,
washed-out vampire movie set in the barren landscape of Oklahoma — is her
masterpiece, Point Break is simply transcendent, a nutso exploration
of masculinity through age-old archetypes. There’s Bodhisattva, the
surfer/philosopher/bank robber/Ronald Reagan mask wearer (Patrick Swayze), and
his foil Johnny Utah, an undercover FBI
agent/sometimes-skydiver/lawyer/one-time college quarterback with a crushed
knee and crushed dreams (Keanu Reeves). Oh, and then there’s Gary Busey. The
stunt sequences bend reality. With lines like “Goddamn, you’re one radical son
of a bitch,” the performances do too. Bigelow won’t be present for that
screening though, so be prepared to leave with a lot of unanswered questions.
To resolve some of them, check out our interview with the filmmaker at
www.stuffboston.com. And for more details on the retrospective, visit
www.hcl.harvard.edu/hfa.
