GUILTY PLEASURES by Godfrey
Cheshire, 1994

After seeing director Roger Avary's debut film, you may find yourself both disturbed and compelled in a way that "eludes easy explanation."
Killing Zoe, a dark, crafty bank heist movie with a drolly deceptive title, issues from writer-director Roger Avary, but the most celebrated name in its credits is likely to mark it as the latest event in the Season Of Quentin Tarantino. In some ways, that's less unfair than appropriate, since Tarantino seems inscribed in Killing Zoe not just as executive producer but as eminence grise, a tantalizing thematic presence.
As much as Avary may resent debuting in Tarantino's shadow, Killing Zoe obviously owes its existence to their friendship. The two met as clerks in a California video store (a setting memorialized in 1993's True Romance, which they co-wrote). Both were aiming to make films. Tarantino got his off the ground first, and it was Reservoir Dogs producer Lawrence Bender who, in scouting locations for the movie, ran across an unused bank he thought would be a great setting for a film.
Bender showed the site to Avary and asked if he had any scripts set in a bank. (Don't most aspiring screenwriters?) Sure, bluffed Avary, who went home and, according to his own account, wrote one in a matter of days. Although it's not evident in the finished film, the resulting script contains the following scene description, under the heading INT. ERIC'S FLAT - BEDROOM - NIGHT: "Eric's bed has probably never been made. In fact, this room looks a lot like Quentin Tarantino's old apartment."
You get a sense of the friendship in that aside, yet the note of amicable sparring is perhaps even more important. Though executive-produced by Tarantino and Bender, and centered on a character who resembles one in Pulp Fiction (both are played by Eric Stoltz), Killing Zoe shows Avary to be very much his own man. Indeed, it's hard to imagine many filmmakers, Tarantino included, conceiving Avary's first audacity: setting the tale entirely in Paris, when the film had to be shot in California.
If that produced an instant creative dilemma, Avary's solution - shoot an opening sequence of exteriors in Paris, then make the rest of the film interiors - dovetails nicely with a story that's basically "interior" in the mytho-psychological sense, too. A realistically detailed bank-job suspenser the film surely is; Dog Day Afternoon will be everyone's first reference point. Yet Nosferatu, the movie that Killing Zoe itself references, provides a closer approximation of the nightmare-come-to-light that Avary has folded inside his bloody crime caper.
As in Halloween and its post-Murnau spawn, sex is the doorway into darkness. American safe-cracker Zed (Stoltz), importuned on his way into Paris by a genial cabbie-cum-pimp, orders a hooker for the night and opens his hotel door to find the lissome, blonde Zoe (Julie Delpy) at his service. After they do it - as the original vampire sails for England on the room's TV - they bond, Zed cozying to her claim that this one isn't just a job; she really likes him. Their post-coital snooze has barely commenced when Zed's French cohort Eric (Jean-Hugues Anglade) barges in, sees Zoe and unceremoniously chucks her into the hall naked, tossing her clothes out when she starts screaming.
The hallmark of Avary's hero, in this moment and many that come later, is that he does nothing when most people would make some sort of fuss. Such passivity might be explained in various ways, but its anomalousness is what resonates, nightmare-wise: Zed-as-nought is like a dreamer transfixed by the horror of his own helplessness. Still, that incapacity perhaps also masks something deeper, and guiltier: his attraction to abomination incarnate, his very own Nosferatu - Eric.
The story clues us that they were boyhood pals when Eric spent half the year in the states with his divorced mom. It is due to that old friendship that Eric, a junkie who sees himself as a criminal mastermind, has invited Zed to join his gang's big Bastille Day heist. But first, he proposes, a little fun.
That entails meeting the gang, six Franco-grunge hoods, and joining a night's revelry that begins with booze, pot and heroin all 'round. Next comes hot-rodding through Paris shouting "faggot" at the ambient hustlers, an odd occasion for Eric to casually drop the news that he has AIDS - "from the needle." Afterwards, at a weirdly out-of-time Dixieland joint, the tide of drink and dope reaches flood stage, and Zed, passing out in the toilet, catches a last-flicker-of-consciousness glimpse of Eric, anally ramming one of the gang in a nearby stall.
The next day's bank robbery, heart of the movie and spectacular crescendo of disasters though it is, merely plays out the violent, murky tensions set up in the prologue. The gang, wearing animal masks, crashes into the bank only to see their plans go dreadfully awry. Bullets fly, bodies drop. In the vault area, Zed watches dumbstruck as Eric executes a whimpering matron and the manager in an effort to get the safe opened.
Increasingly maniacal as the catastrophes mount, Eric shoots smack to calm nerves that get another jangle when he's recognized by one of the bank's employees: Zoe. It is her presence that, after much mayhem and confusion, finally jolts our hero from his frozen state, obliging him to choose - even if, in effect, circumstances make the choice for him - between the girl and a "friend" who has metamorphosed into something like a Gallic Charles Manson a la John Woo.
Avary's handling of this fraught, sometimes nerve-wracking drama is consummately assured. Closer to Clear & Present Danger, say, than to Reservoir Dogs, his style is textured, taut and lucid rather than self-consciously formalistic. That some people, it seems, passionately hate the film serves as a roundabout tribute to his skill at making its necessary violence visceral and stomach-turning, not, thankfully, jokey or arch.
His work with actors proves no less adept. Eric Stoltz, whom I thought should be forced into retirement after the insipid Bodies, Rest & Motion and Naked In New York, is fine here, and he's well matched by Delpy's spirited Zoe. The film's negative center, meanwhile, is brilliantly realized by French actor Anglade, whose Eric emerges as a more horrific and memorable villain than you'll find in any action blockbuster.
That Killing Zoe isn't finally as sophisticated as it means to be doesn't lessen its spiky allure. On the contrary, Tarantino's and Avary's appeal lies in their charged fusion of cinephilic knowledge and personal innocence; they are still kids trying, with infectious passion and a certain heedless naivete, to emulate their heroes. Thus Zoe sets its sights on Lumet and the French New Wave (Tarantino compares its hotel-room sequence to Rohmer) and much else, yet its feet are still planted in Roger Corman and Friday The 13th. It's the tension between those poles, not the possible predominance of the more "artistic," that gives the film its strange complexity.
Avary, perhaps, thinks that his dream-tale owes something to Joseph Campbell, but consider the moral universe it sets up - a Manichean's wet dream. On one side, embodied by Eric: homosex, false friendship, drugs and disease (Cf. Nosferatu), selfishness-unto-insanity, brutality, death. On the other side, Zoe's (whose name means "life" in Greek): heterosex, true love, nurturing, selflessness, generosity, life. That's all square enough for Senator Helms, and deserves to be defended precisely for that perversity: However unintendedly, it articulates the one contemporary myth that American movies dare not embrace.
Of course, Avary doesn't embrace it, either; he imagines he's doing something much different. But the sense that he can't escape his own, moralistic doppelganger - the ghost of D.W. Griffith, wearing a Ronald Reagan mask - infuses the tale with an oddness that at once overwhelms and enlivens the generic conflict of Zed and Eric. Inevitably, you come out of the film bothered in a way that eludes easy explanation.
Yet that, I think, may be the key to the fascination and uneasy promise of both Avary and Tarantino: Their movies are the first in ages to forcefully posit movies as guilty pleasures. While the films are debated for their violence, underneath the mayhem and hipness is something - call it an urge toward redemption, or moral purpose - that signals a very old-fashioned concern for the medium's worth and effects. That the filmmakers may not fully comprehend that concern hardly blunts its impact; rather, it gives it the force of an irresistible impulse.
The personal impulses behind Killing Zoe are also worth pondering. Does Zed's struggle with the diabolical Eric contain a hint, however distant or "absurd," of Avary's relationship with Tarantino? Make of this what you will: At the end of a long interview with the two filmmakers this summer, I noted there was time for one more question. Before I could ask one, Avary, laughing, volunteered an answer: "We are not gay lovers."
That wasn't the question, I said. But since he broached the subject, what of the fact that both Killing Zoe and Pulp Fiction contain pivotal scenes of men engaged in anal intercourse?
Responded Avary: "Quentin wrote both of those!" Tarantino, giggling at the other side of the table, didn't deny that he supplied the toilet scene in Killing Zoe. He simply replied that Avary, in fact, was responsible for the anal intercourse scene in Pulp Fiction. Avary then rejoined that although he did write the Bruce Willis episode in Pulp, Tarantino conjured up the rear-end indignities visited upon Marcellus Wallace.
As I say, interpret as you will. At the very least, it suggests that future film scholars will have a jolly time figuring out who contributed what to the intertwined work of two directors who are currently altering the mindscape of American movies.