Mascara comes sooo close to being great Eurotrash.
It ticks all the right boxes: Sexual secrets! Murder! Sleazy set-pieces! Michael
Sarrazin in drag! Unfortunately, Belgian director Patrick Conrad decided to aim
for the art house crowd, so prepare for your exploitation expectations to get
doused by a cold glass of pretension and boredom.
Mascara was distributed by
Canon Films, but it’s clear
director Patrick Conrad wanted it
to be part of the Artificial Eye/
Curzon catalog.
Wealthy Gaby Hart (Charlotte Rampling) and police director Bert Sanders (Sarrazin) are an elite, opera loving couple, but fuck Gaby, this movie is about Bert. While watching a performance of Orpheus and Eurydice, Bert becomes transfixed—not by the lead diva’s performance but her costume (think Bob Mackie if he were designing for a more modest Cher). He immediately approaches costume designer Chris (Derek de Lint) about borrowing the gown for a friend’s birthday. Chris says no, but he’s as transfixed by Gaby as Bert is by the gown, so he relents if it means he can see Gaby again. Except, surprise, the friend Chris has in mind is not Gaby but Pepper (Eva Robins).
Other surprises follow, as well as a fair amount of sleaze and murder. Bert wants Pepper to wear the gown as she lip-synchs opera on stage at Mister Butterfly, a literal underground club featuring a variety of sexual nonconformists and kinky exhibitions, including an extra from Cats giving bloody blowjobs, an androgynous man eating oysters from a gimp’s mouth, and a man lowering his jock-strapped ass over a woman’s face (at least I think it’s a woman; the genders of the performers are often as murky as the lighting). You’d think with all these titillating sideshows that Pepper’s performance would be ignored, but the audience is spellbound, especially Bert, who appears a little turned on. Yet when Pepper offers her naked body to him (“I know all there is to know…about the crying game”), Bert is enraged that she’d think he’s anything other than heterosexual and kills her. When his attempt to dump the body is interrupted, he decides the best way to cover up the crime is to kill other trans performers and frame Chris.
Just as things are getting interesting, Gaby and Chris begin an affair. A very calm, tasteful affair. It’s the type of affair that would drive you back to your spouse, just to spice things up. What I’m trying to say is Gaby and Chris’s relationship is tragically dull, and a tragic waste of Rampling, who has little to do other than strut through the movie wearing chic-for-their-time pantsuits and smile enigmatically. At the risk of spoiling things (skip to the next paragraph now if you must), the character of Gaby would’ve been better used as Bert’s co-conspirator rather than the movie’s tragic heroine.
Mascara sort of reminded me of the 1989 giallo Arabella: Black Angel, if Arabella tried to be classy. Fortunately, Arabella knew what it was. Mascara, like its main character Bert, wants to keep its salacious subject matter at an arm’s distance when it would’ve done better to fully embrace it. As it is, Romy Haag’s Marianne Faithfull-at-half-price cover of Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night” will likely stick with you longer than the movie’s Madonna music video-style kink.
