Beth B’s Under Lock and Key

In the doorway of the gallery is a large black box. Its brutal bulk is intensely intimidating.

It should be.

The box is actually four isolation cells. Inside each cell is a metal slab, a drain hole and a single, bare bulb. Through a speaker hidden in the cell’s ceiling, excerpts are played from convict-author Jack Henry Abbot’s book In the Belly of the Beast.

Behind the cell block, at the back of the gallery, are two large, rear-projection screens. On the right, an actor plays serial killer Ted Bundy, using material culled from interviews before Bundy’s execution. On the left, people who have been assaulted read letters that they have written to their attackers.

The alternating images are periodically joined together in blurred abstractions of trees. They form slow streaks across the screen. It’s as if they were a visualization of a scream.

This is the cold, dark heart of Under Lock and Key, Beth B’s multimedia installation at the Wexner Center for the Arts. The exhibit is harsh, didactic and unrelenting. It’s also a direct confrontation with evil.

The exhibit has a raw, visceral effect: it’s crudely dramatic and extremely uncomfortable.

But Beth B’s work is never comfortable. She is the punk poet of the primal scream.

She is best known as a filmmaker, gaining her initial notoriety at the end of the ‘70s with the Super-8 movies G-Man, The Offenders, and Black Box. The films are a crazy quilt of rambling narratives, primitive techniques and taboo violations – an odd mishmash of Franz Kafka, Amnesty International reports on torture and post-Oedipal loathing.

The punk “no-wave” movement was in full gear at that time and the films were tremendously popular, playing all over New York’s lower East Side. The Offenders was presented as a regular serial at Max’s Kansas City – the musical mecca of punkdom. Despite the films’ venomous anti-aesthetic approach, they found their way into such venues as the Contemporary Art Museum of Chicago.

And the films kept coming. There are her features – Vortex, Salvation! and the soon-to-be-released Two Small Bodies. Not to mention her music videos, with such catchy titles as Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight.

But Beth B is a painter and printmaker (and the daughter of painter Ida Applebroog), as well as a filmmaker. Under Lock and Key unites her diverse media in a single, focused context.

The early films provide crucial references to her current exhibit. Black Box is about a man who is kidnapped, stripped, hung upside down and eventually placed within a torture chamber based upon devises used by the Chilean secret police. Another film, Letters to Dad, is a series of tight close-ups of performers delivering a dead-pan reading of letters written to Jim Jones by his followers, just before he ordered them to commit mass suicide.

Under Lock and Key carries a tremendous amount of psychic baggage – the soul-destroying weight of a faltering culture. It presents the various kinds of force and violence that are used on the battle fronts of class, racial and sexual warfare. Ironically, it forces itself upon the viewer.

And it succeeds in its intentions: it opens the door to the prison-like psyche of society’s victims.

A Dangerous Woman

Debra Winger is still trying to prove herself as a dramatic actress. That's one of the driving forces behind A Dangerous Woman. The other key factor is Steven Spielberg, whose Amblin Entertainment company helped press the project along. Which explains the fact that A Dangerous Woman is laced with heavy-weight ambitions. Unfortunately, the final result is closer to a TV movie-of-the-week than heavy-hitting cinema.

In A Dangerous Woman, Winger goes dowdy as the slow-witted Martha, a woman whose thoughts and feelings are hidden behind a shell almost as thick as her glasses. She survives largely through the charity of her aunt (Barbara Hershey), a middle-aged widow who's preoccupied with problems involving her married politico lover. Especially after the spurned wife comes running through her front door in a car.

The demolished porch left behind by Mrs. Politico is the least of Martha's concerns. Her best friend (Chloe Webb) has a boyfriend who's stealing money from the cash register at the dry cleaner where they all work – and he's busy framing Martha for the theft.

The closest thing to a bright spot in her life is Mackey (Gabriel Byrne), a half-drunk handyman who shows up to fix the porch. When he's sober, he's a calm but compassionate observer of her dilemma. The bad news is, he's not often sober – he gets stewed every night and turns into an erratic mix of bitterness and passion. He is, however, apparently the only man who ever stood up for Martha, which fuels the attraction she feels for him. They have a fling that's briefer than a one-night stand, but one that bonds Martha to Mackey nonetheless.

Despite her wallflower persona, Martha possesses a very dangerous quality: she's incapable of telling a lie. Ironically, she's the person most threatened by this aspect of her personality.

A Dangerous Woman is being pitched as a thriller, but it isn't. It's a moody, down-beat character study laced with some bleak ironies.

Winger's performance in the film is quite good, but it's Hershey and Byrne who stand out. This isn't surprising from Hershey, who's one of the finest and most under-rated performers around. It's unexpected from Byrne, however, who seems bent on a career of playing a poetically drunken Irishman. He's good at it, but you get the feeling he's warming up for the bio-pic on Richard Harris.

A Dangerous Woman has a good, off-beat, dramatic feel. The only problem is that it doesn't take it far enough. It ends up being a small film that would have played great on the tube.

Angie

Martha Coolidge has served enough time in the Hollywood grind mill to apply for workers' comp. Despite her directorial debut with the con­troversial documentary Not A Pretty Picture, and the highly praised romantic comedy Valley Girl, Coolidge has spent nearly a decade trying to gain commercial footing. She did her time on TV with Sledge Hammer, and she barely survived directing several forgettable teenage flicks. Rambling Rose finally returned her to critical favor, and Lost in Yonkers made her bankable, Now, with Angie, Coolidge finally has found that magical mix of feminist concern and money-making mirth that will place her in Hollywood's front rank.

In many ways, Angie seesaws so wildly between orig­inality and cliche that it repeatedly threatens to implode into a sticky mess of predictable moments. It's littered with enough typical statements about Italian-American culture and slightly dumb male behavior to qualify as a talk show topic. Most of this material rings true, although we've seen it too many times before. But under Coolidge's direc­tion, Angie maneuvers some neat, sharp turns through this familiar landscape.

The story focuses on the lead character's (Geena Davis) discovery of her out-of-wedlock pregnancy — and, more impor­tantly, her realization that the circumstances offer an opportunity for her to finally understand both herself and her parents.

Which isn't easy. Angie's father refuses to say anything about his first wife — her mother — who fled the family when Angie was only three. But then, her father has the habit of not saying much about anything until it's too late to matter. Much the same is true of her boyfriends, Vinnie and Noel.

Davis successfully plays her part with a sure mix of innocent charm and well-placed despair. But it's Coolidge who should finally earn some popular recogni­tion, as a filmmaker who knows that being mainstream doesn't mean being brain dead, Angie is a delightful surprise.

The Last Days of Chez Nous

Gillian Armstrong is more than just a critically prominent woman film­maker. She's also a survivor of the New Australian cinema movement.

With her latest work, The Last Days of Chez Nous, Armstrong returns to her roots in both style and subject matter. She also returns to the basic points that made the New Australian cinema one of the more exciting film events of the late '70s: it's an intelligent film that wrestles with the pecu­liar contradictions of Australian society.

The Chez Nous of the tide is a small, ramshackle house in Sydney. Its peeling paint and barely functioning kitchen are the primary motifs in the film's leisurely tale of domestic collapse.

The overwhelming clutter indicates that no attention is being paid to basic caretaking of the house — and serves as metaphor for the lead characters' disintegrating marriage

At the center of Chez Nous is Beth (Lisa Harrow), a middle-aged writer who is emotionally blocked in her relationship with her French husband, J.P. (Bruno Ganz). He insists that she wants too much resolution, but Beth doesn't appear to be capable of resolving or coping with much of anything — especially the intrusive visit by her sister and her domineering father.

Beth knows that at certain, crucial levels, she simply is not in touch with her feelings. The core of her problem finally becomes apparent during a protracted, seemingly pointless drive through the Outback with her demeaning father. He's a man of few words, most of which take shape as nasty comments about what an idiot Beth is. The cruel commentary serves as a mask to hide his own possessive, nearly incestuous atti­tude toward her.

Meanwhile, back on the home front, J.P. begins an affair with Beth's sister.

There's more to Chez Nous than simple domestic melodrama and Aussie angst, however.

The film conveys a general sense of estrangement that belongs, particularly, to Australians. Like the rock formations in the Outback, Australian society often possesses a singularly impressive, but barren, look. As J.P. put it, while seeing a photo of an area visited by Beth and her father, "What a dreadful looking country."

The Last Days of Chez Nous is undoubt­edly Armstrong's best work since her first, and critically acclaimed, film, My Brilliant Career. It's also her finest statement yet about the psyche of her own country, which exists somewhere between families' confining homes and nature's empty space