*Postcards from America*

         	  reviewed by Cynthia Fuchs

  
     *Postcards from America* opens on a wide desert landscape, pierced by
a highway that stretches to the stark horizon, apparently going nowhere. 
A young man, David (James Lyons), haggard and lovely, stares out across
this distance, so familiar as a sign of "American" possibility and
independence. The camera circles him, restless, seemingly unable to stay
put. "Speeding, speeding," he says in voice-over, "It's the only emotion
that makes the heart unravel... It makes me think of men's bodies... the
sway, the dance of sex." 

     A fictional riff on the autobiographical writings of artist and
essayist David Wojnarowicz - especially his books *Close to the Knives*
and *Memories That Smell Like Gasoline* - this film is, on one level,
about movement, about searching and speeding. Like its source, it's not an
easy ride.  Directed by Steve McLean and produced by Craig Paull and
Christine Vachon, the movie piles up fragments, images, and rants that
tear along like poetry, a series of "postcards" from multiple times and
places, all suffused with loss and rage, the immeasurable effects of
homophobia and AIDS. "There's something in my body that's trying to
fucking kill me," David tells you right off, his hands to his head, his
body bent in despair. 

     But on another level, this is a movie about resilience and
preservation. I wouldn't say that it's about "art" (or maybe "Art"),
because Wojnarowicz's work resists any artistic conventions relentlessly
and brilliantly. Rather, the movie gets at his passionate embrace of
contradictions, his intensely subjective, acute assessments of "a world
growing more and more insane." It offers little in the way of a regular
plot and developing characters. Instead, it deals in moments, memories
which are at once jarring and visceral, bleeding into each other. These
images carry you across three distinct yet interconnected time periods,
featuring David as a boy (played by Olmo Tighe), adolescent (Michael
Tighe) and young adult (Lyons). 

     As a movie about AIDS, fractured identities, and any number of
cultural panics, *Postcards* owes something to the narrative and formal
stylizations of Todd Haynes' films (for instance, *Poison* and *Safe*):
the camerawork can be unnerving, gesturing toward surrealism while
anchored in a creepy everydayness. At times the camera seems too still, as
when it holds on David's mother (Maggie Low), foregrounded and deathly
pale, describing her marriage to his abusive, alcoholic father (Michael
Ringer). At other times, it's almost predatory, circling around
interactions between boy-David and his father so they look trapped inside
their cramped living room. Deep shadows and tilted framing intensify the
threats implied by dad's whiskey bottle and recliner, the blue-ish glare
of the television and the absurdity of cheap Christmas decorations. "I
tried to understand something about my father," says David, "What he might
have seen looking into the mirror." 

     Of course, this effort has everything to do with David looking for
"himself," a coherent shape for the life that's now running away from him.
His memories mix with fantasies, his rebelliousness with sadness and
longing. There's no nostalgia here, no dreamy hope for a better future. 
Past and present collide, the connections between them impressionistic and
brutal, so that teen-David's prostitution and boy-David's beatings by his
father seem of a piece with adult-David's reckless hitchhiking.  Boy-David
approaches a perfectly plastic couple, doing breakfast in their sunlit
dining room: "I will wake you up and welcome you to your bad dream," he
says, as Team Mom-and-Dad smile on him. Cut to the next scene: they're in
bed, the light is dim, their faces are strained. Cut to David, watching
some beautiful guy kick his tires at a gas station, tentative, hopeful,
adrift. 

     Such juxtapositions make you take an active part in understanding
what you watch. David, his parents, his hustler-buddy (Michael Imperioli),
the drag queen who offers them safe haven, any of the guys who pick up
David when he's hitching - they're all lost, all looking for something,
all trying to put pieces together. And by the time it's over, you feel
like it's been too fast, that some answer might be over that next horizon.
Or maybe not. Still, the trip is extraordinary. 
  
  

Cynthia Fuchs teaches film/media studies and is coordinator of the queer
studies project at George Mason University.

Copyright by Cynthia Fuchs.  All rights reserved.
Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the author.

This review originally appeared in the Philadelphia _City Paper_.