Siesta

This is the kind of movie that patrons will return and say: "What the heck was this all about?" Touted as this year's Blue Velvet, music video director Mary Lambert's first feature film effort has more in common with MTV than David Lynch's disturbing masterwork. Initially, the plot is intriguing: a woman (Ellen Barkin) awakens at the edge of an airport runway, bruised, bloody, and amnesiac. Through flashbacks, we learn that Claire (Barkin) has found out that her ex-lover living in Spain, Augustine (Gabriel Byrne), has married. We also learn that Claire, a professional stuntwoman has run out on her promoter husband Del (Martin Sheen), days before a televised skydive over a volcano. Snippets of flashback interspersed throughout hint that someone has been killed in the love triangle between Barkin, Byrne, and Isabella Rossellini (Augustine's new wife). Before this convoluted goose chase has run its course, the film takes a deeply religious turn, and all of the characters: Julian Sands as a tormented artist, Grace Jones as a black market entrepreneur, and Jodie Foster as a spoiled nouveau poor are forced by the surprise ending of the story to take on allegorical status. They are all guardian angels of a sort, who are guiding Barkin to the truth. But, in the spirit of this metaphor-mixing mishmash, when you run this story through the baptismal fire of logic, it just doesn't wash. The film was apparently shot at the same time as Ken Russell's equally forgettable Gothic (which starred Byrne and Sands), and utilizes Russell's approach to moviemaking: form is everything. Siesta is pretty, and pretty empty. Not recommended.