Dementia (1955)

27 Apr 2023

Rating: 4.5/5

Well, damn, if Preston Sturges likes it, by god, I should too

Lit like a noir and scored like an alien invasion flick, a woman walks through a world of violence — a battered wife showing her bruise, a man stabbed in the street — and sex — the woman pimped out to an Orson Welles doppelgänger who takes her out to various night clubs where he can’t stop ogling the dancer — where no one speaks a word

Psychotic episodes fragment the film, taking her to various places full of images of repression and sublimation — we see actors repeated, scenes loop into one another — this is the woman’s nightmare or her psychotic break

In some ways, it could be considered an American Un Chien Andalou with the sort of Freudian way it handles its story, but I think it has its own perversions on its mind

Regardless, it rules


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