Part of The Sight and Sound Top 10 (#8)
The movie is a sensual mystery: Betty, fresh from Deep River, Ontario, and Rita, car crash survivor, at the center of secrets with no one to turn to but each other. The movie within the movie is a fragmented biography: Diane, ground down by the industry, and Camilla, dangerously close to the top of the ladder, telling each other’s story, with the gulf between tellings threatening to devour the whole world. The dream is of betrayal, of facing the undeniable moral truth of oneself. The movies, they say, are a beautiful lie, and all lies must eventually yield to a reckoning.
The rest is silence.
“One of the very few movies in which the pieces not only add up to much more than the whole, but also supersede it with a series of (for the most part) fascinating fragments.” —Andrew Sarris, Observer “It is an explosively sexy love story, rocket-fuelled with vanity and cruelty.” —Peter Bradhsaw, Guardian “Pure cinema — a gorgeous, noir-narcotic loop of heartbreak in the ‘dream place’ of Los Angeles.” —Danny Leigh, Financial Times
