This hostility is as much a part of the Schrader atmosphere as his social criticism, which becomes, from his early films to his later ones, less specific and pointed, more linked to the confusing climate of an obsessive and beleaguered character's private universe. PATTY HEARST (1988; February 1 at 7 pm) depicts the erasure of the kidnapped heiress's amorphous identity and her rebirth as a phony red warrior amid a micro-society of intellectual midgets. (Compared with the Symbionese Liberation Army members in this film, the dimmest of the young Maoists in Jean-Luc Godard's '68-'71 work are on an intellectual par with Antonio Gramsci.) Through canny set design and aggressive camerawork, Schrader transforms the characters' low-priced apartment spaces into distorted mindscapes lit through the rips in window shades. A dark comedy about early-'70s American culture crossed with an avant-garde horror conceit about the manipulation of underfed brains, Patty Hearst is a Pyrrhic victory of a film in which the jubilation of satire gets all damp and constricted amid much psychic heavy weather.
In LIGHT SLEEPER (1991; January 31 at 7 pm, with the director present), a revision of American Gigolo, Schrader uses the same narrative pattern but exchanges LA for Manhattan and upscale hustling for upscale drug dealing. As in American Gigolo, he likes to allude to his thriller plot rather than play its servant — which is fine, but this high-handed sophistication leaves his film high and dry during the inevitable moments when it must exist mainly to forward or wrap up the plot. The performances of Willem Dafoe and Susan Sarandon are so good that one wishes the movie were less sluggish, less mannerist, freer. Some of Schrader's visual ideas are successful: in a shot of a psychic's face reflected in a mirror behind Dafoe as she tries or purports to visualize the fateful forces gathering around him, the compositional tension raises the mystery of the narrative to a peak of ambiguity. But to work, Light Sleeper needed to be a more modest, sleazier film — a Roger Corman or Larry Cohen–type effort — or else a less compromised one, a Wim Wenders–like movie purely about exploration of mood and territory.
HARDCORE (1979; February 1 at 9:15 pm) oscillates between repression and a prim sleaze, understatement and overstatement. The sleaze is all designed, a commentary on itself; it's revealing that what could have been a big triumph of showy direction — George C. Scott knocking someone through the wallboard partitions of different-themed rooms in an S&M brothel — plays more like a comedy-show sketch, just because Schrader is too austere, too minimalist to play up his own visual idea for all it's worth. Scott puts the film over by showing an interesting way not to resolve contradictions of tone and behavior, as his character transforms himself with alarming ease from a devoutly Calvinist Midwestern businessman into the kind of porn-movie producer who auditions actors in a motel room. The film lives through Scott's performance, but there is something studied, unfelt, unreal about Schrader's handling of its potent thematic tensions.
