Mr. Sleeman Is Coming

     Liquid Sky

     Slava Tsukerman's Liquid Sky (1982) reveals a portrait of early 1980s New York through its new wave/punk/avant-garde and fashion scenes.  It's also a science fiction film depicting an alien ship the size of a dinner tray landing on the roof of model Margaret's (Anne Carlisle) penthouse apartment with a majestic view of the Empire State Building.  

     The tiny alien inside the ship seeks heroin but discovers that feeding off someone's energy at the point of orgasm makes for a better high.  Margaret finds that her climaxing lovers, and in one case, her rapist, are crunched down into nothing, dissolved by some force.  Meanwhile, fashion photographers, journalists, hangers-on in one scene enter her apartment even as her sense of reality warps, causing her to believe she's causing the strange deaths.

     "I kill with my cunt," she says; a line I suspect has never been spoken in a film before or since.  

     Her at times vicious heroin-dealing friend Adrian (Paula E. Sheppard), in the habit of egging Margaret on, leads the fashion mob in encouraging Margaret to fellate Jimmy, an androgynous man also played by Anne Carlisle.  Jimmy has the look of David Bowie from the Let's Dance era of the singer's career.  In this case, Margaret kills with her mouth, but she doesn't realize it's the alien taking his life.  

     In many shots the alien ship can be seen, perched at the edge of the roof among soda bottles and other detritus from a past party.  Across the way in another building, a German scientist and ufologist (Otto von Wernherr) has gotten to know Sylvia (Susan Doukas), a lonely, horny woman who gives the scientist umpteen signals indicating she wants to have sex with him, but he's preoccupied with the alien craft, using his portable telescope.  During their "date," Sylvia and Johann wait for the Chinese food she ordered, all of the dishes including shrimp for some reason.  They look through the telescope, seeing weird activity in Margaret's apartment, including the disposal of a professor friend of Margaret's after she's fucked him, and as as far she believes, killed him.  At this stage, the alien kills her lovers with a prismatic crystal shard through the brain.  Adrian and Margaret put the professor into a big cardboard box and leave it on the balcony ten or fifteen feet from the alien ship.

     It should be obvious by now that Liquid Sky is a weird movie.  What works well is the fact that it's not affectedly weird, weird for weirdness' sake.  The backdrop of New York's nightclub scene in that time provides a harmonious fusion with the plot's amusing strangeness.  Anne Carlisle, playing a woman and a man, is fantastic and believable, seeming almost tranced at times as Margaret the farther she gets into the dire irreality of her situation.  In her male role, Jimmy, she sneers, judgmentally shits on Margaret every chance he gets.  There are times in this film when Carlisle's dual performance (Shakespearean in its woman/man presentation) so dominates the overall structure that one can forget about the goofy Edward D. Wood-like science fiction element.  Even so, the alien element (represented visually by the absurd little ship and a multi-colored eye inside) cannot be overlooked anymore than the film's setting of New York circa 1981-1982.  

     Numerous beautiful transition shots depict the city at that time, including the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and many gorgeous shots of the Empire State Building.  I get the impression that the alien chose this spot because of all the colorful freaks moving through so many fascinating locations.

     Margaret's journey took her from a normal life as a young girl in Connecticut to New York, where she transformed herself, radically changing her hair, painting her face in a variety of ways on a night by night basis, dancing and posing for photographers, becoming a fashion plate of New Wave style, resembling at times a Patrick Nagel image in motion.  

     Carlisle's performance is the great thing in Liquid Sky, while the overall story, which she co-wrote with the director, merits much admiration, a work of unique cinematic art costing half a million dollars--the kind of film that will sing louder and louder its merits in the eyes of film watchers as time passes, making a lot of expensive movies of the same period seem mediocre.

                                                                                 Vic Neptune