The film opens on a dream-like scene in a desert of blowing amber sand where young women are sacrificed to leopards. It plays more like myth or metaphor than literal flashback, a beguiling, beautiful, terrible fantasy of sex and magic and flesh and fur in what could be the most magnificent cinematic snow globe ever shaken on screen. The dissolve to a sublime close-up of Nastassja Kinski, arriving at the New Orleans airport, immediately connect her to that out-of-time, supernatural imagery. Kinski is Irena Gallier, an orphan reuniting with her brother Paul (Malcolm McDowell), a minister with an unseen congregation, after years apart. As she wanders the city by day, she drifts to the zoo and is mesmerized by the leopards, which is what brings her together with Oliver Yates (John Heard), the curator of the zoo with an affinity for the large cats. Which doesn't sit well with Paul, who finally shares the family secret with her: they are of a race that transforms into leopards when they have sex with humans. "We are an incestuous race," he informs her. Irena, who is still a virgin, is appalled. Paul, who still feeds his sexual desires despite the consequences (not only does he transform after sex but he must kill to return to human form), targets his rival.
Calling this a remake isn't really accurate, even with a couple of notable homages to the original film. Alan Ormsby's screenplay doesn't just update the story, it reimagines it with a mythology that is both more literal and more dreamlike than the original. It still equates sex with the animal inside, but along with the fear of unleashing that force is the exhilaration and freedom it brings. Irena is instinctively afraid of sex even as her desire for Oliver grows. Oliver is a classic Schrader hero, the loner and intellectual who goes on an odyssey to be with the woman he loves (he recites Dante at one point in the film), and he stands in for Schrader himself in many ways. Schrader fell in love and had an affair with Kinski during the making of the film and that passion and obsession surely drove the intensity of his filmmaking. Is Schrader channeling some of his own fears of losing the young Kinski (she was 20 when production began, he was 34) when Irena transforms into a wild panther after making love for the first time?
Cat People was Kinski's second American film and she makes a stunning impression: young, fresh, at once androgynous (with her short haircut and slim, boyish figure) and alluring, her saucer eyes and full lips suggesting both innocent and experience. And there is something feline in the way she inhabits the frame, something that McDowell also brings to the role. Where he exudes in his cat-swagger and his prowling performance, Kinski suggests it in her eyes and her sleek Siamese presence.
The design of the film is entrancing. The zoo is not real but a grand set, with oppressively small cages that would be decried in the real world but have a beautiful vintage feel to them on screen, like a holdover from the 19th century. Behind the cages are the atrium-style offices and labs and workrooms of the staff in a warren of room and walkways, a two-story space that allows Schrader's camera to prowl the human space and take in the animal habitats at the same time. The worlds are constantly brought together, most memorably when Oliver takes Irena to his cabin in the bayou. The atmosphere of the swamp, with its aural backdrop of insect noises rising to a thunderous jungle of wild sounds, is like the call of the wild to Irena, who follows overwhelming instinct and embarks on a nocturnal hunt.
Schrader paints the film with a palette of old world atmosphere and modern, unreal colors (designed by Scarfiotti in the art direction as well as in the lighting). Tom Burman's transformation effects are sometimes garish and often beautiful, making literal what was implied (and possibly only in Irena's mind) in the original, but the live cats (actually cougars dyed black) bring a primal charge to the film. The film slips back and forth between the visual elegance of Schrader's choreographed camerawork and intimate direction and the slashes of sex and violence of its Jungian themes turned into horror movie spectacle. And the quintessentially eighties electronic drum beat aside, Giorgio Moroder's electronic score is moody and entrancing.
While Schrader doesn't take any screenplay credit, the ending is all his and it is a fascinating contradiction of romantic tragedy and sexual imprisonment. It's not just the most explicit (consensual) bondage scene in a mainstream American film, which is still as transgressive and powerful more than thirty years after it was shot. There's a complicated mix of willing sacrifice, sexual surrender, domination and submission, and control over the wild nature that man cannot tame. Schrader directs it as a tragic moment with mythic resonance, a roar of impossible love in the only compromise that nature will allow, but it also carries an uncomfortable edge of fear of and domination over one woman's sexual autonomy. That Schrader manages to have it both ways is testament to the primal resonance of the themes and Schrader's commitment to the conflict of animal instinct and human intellect, sex and love, desire and denial. There really is nothing else like this in American movies.
The disc is beautifully mastered; the color seeps into every image and becomes more saturated as the film goes on. The soundtrack has good surround separation and a dynamic range wider than most discs I view; much of it is quiet and hushed and there's a temptation to turn it up, only to get blasted by dramatic bursts of sound.
The Blu-ray debut doesn't carry over any of the supplements from Universal's earlier DVD (which features Paul Schrader commentary and interview and a couple of vintage featurettes). Instead it offers seven new video interviews, five of them with key members of the cast: a fidgety Nastassja Kinski (5 mins), thoughtful talks with John Heard (6 mins) and Annette O'Toole (8 ½ mins) on their characters, Lynn Lowry detailing the physical challenges of her single scene (just short of 6 mins), and Malcolm McDowell discussing the casting and preparing for the role, and remarking on the qualities that Kinski brought to her role (7 ½ mins).
Giorgio Moroder talks about scoring the film but doesn't offer much insight to the process (5 ½ mins) but Paul Schrader (no surprise) offers the most articulate and introspective of the interviews (9 mins). He discusses the origins of the project, the style, and the themes that attracted him, the contributions of Ferdinando Scarfiotti as the film's "visual consultant," and the changes he made to the script, specifically the ending, which still is still startlingly erotic and kinky. His final line offers a fine summation of how the film was received by mainstream audiences at the time: "What I though was cool about the film, the admixture of sex and fear, was not something that seemed to excite the American audiences in the way that it excited me."
By Sean Axmaker
