Donald Cammell’s Wild Side (Director’s Cut)

Imported 35mm Print. The fourth and final film of eccentric filmmaker Donald Cammell, best known for his brilliant 1970 debut Performance co-directed with Nic Roeg, Wild Side was butchered by studio interference, re-cut and taken away from Cammell who subsequently took his own life. A provocative, erotic neo-noir starring Christopher Walken in one of his most over-the-top performances, Wild Side indulges in a rapacious world of power, sex, crime and money. Walken’s paranoid Bruno, a notorious money launderer, is the subject of an undercover sting operation that pulls in Anne Heche’s banker-turned-high-class prostitute, who in turn becomes enraptured with Bruno’s elegant wife (Joan Chen). Painstakingly re-cut by Cammell’s widow and longtime editor using Cammell’s notes and a personal cut, this posthumous director’s cut restores much of its original vision: its humor, avant garde leanings and non-linear plotting, along with a new score by Ryuichi Sakamoto. Screening on one of only two 35mm prints ever made.

Dir. Donald Cammell, 1995/2000, 111 min., 35mm, color, in English. With Anne Heche, Christopher Walken, Joan Chen, Steven Bauer, Allen Garfield, Adam Novak.

Part of Music by Ryuichi Sakamoto