Paul Schrader Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Richard Combs

Critical Essay by Richard Combs

Without the compulsive plot mechanism that usually draws [Schrader's] characters ineluctably towards their destiny …, Cat People tends to disintegrate into a series of notations. That these in themselves remain watchable enough, and at times quite fascinating, is a testament—yet another paradox—to the extent that Schrader's transcendentalist cinema has transcended his own limitations as a writer. American Gigolo marked the point where the force-feeding of characters through the plot mechanism (which became an actual meat-grinder in Rolling Thunder) could be suspended in favour of more meditatively visual comment. Ferdinando Scarfiotti, Bertolucci's collaborator and Schrader's "visual consultant" on American Gigolo, is also at work here: one notices the colour co-ordination between a high shot of the multi-coloured décor of a church and a gaggle of children seen entering the zoo, and the rust-tinted prologue—a brief family history and anthropology of the cat folk—persuades one to accept its tongue-in-cheek hokum as psychological...
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