Paul Morrissey
Heat

LA RECENSIONE

What happens to child prodigies? 

Paul Morrissey, alternative director and collaborator of Andy Warhol, concludes the trilogy starring the fetish actor Joe Dallesandro with this film, which began with Flesh on the theme of prostitution and Trash on drug addiction.
Morrissey revisits Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, but the Hollywood characters have changed: they have become sordid, neurotic, devoted to their neuroses and sexual appetites.

Joey Davis (Joe Dallessandro), a former child prodigy of Hollywood, returns to California to make a fortune as a singer and settles in a motel populated by nymphomaniac characters (the fat landlady who lowers his rent in exchange for sexual performances), neurotics (the hysterical daughter, a borderline lesbian with a child and a girlfriend who hates the mother), and guys who care about nothing but lounging by the pool, sunbathing, and masturbating.
In this small portrait, Joey meets Sally, an elderly actress living in Beverly Hills with her crazy daughter, four past marriages, and all the debts she continues to accumulate to maintain her luxurious lifestyle. Joey moves in with Sylvia in her villa, being supported with the hope that she will help him break through. Meanwhile, the daughter, intending to obviously ruin her mother, makes every advance to seduce Joey. When the latter, after a series of encounters with truly sordid characters, realizes that the woman cannot help him and decides to leave her... this old actress, feeling now at the end of her sunset boulevard, tries to shoot him with an empty gun, remaining in her despair.

All the characters in the film are selfish and think only about achieving their goals: success, sex, and money. Others exist only to enable or achieve these things.

The 1972 film departs from any Hollywood scheme with its random framing and is very entertaining for its witty lines and grotesque characters.

The choice of the main actors is spot-on: the hysterical daughter is really unbearable; the mother, Sylvia, is not Gloria Swanson but gives a perfect performance as the old actress deluded by success and loses all sense when she meets the handsome Joey. The protagonist is perfectly cast: he communicates nothing, only his physicality, his displayed muscles, but the rest is nothing, he is empty.

- "You can't treat me like this, what did I do to you?"

- "You didn't do anything to me, now I'm a star, I have a lot of important things to do."

- "You a star... since when? You? You're a fucking star! A hustler, that's what you are!"

- "Eh, fuck off!"

- "Fuck off, me? Damn, I'll kill you, I'll kill you!! I'll crush you, you shouldn't have done that to me! I'll destroy you, you're nothing!! I'm an actress!! I'm a star!! You won't achieve anything on your own, all you can do is screw!!"