A few of AMERICAN MARY’s memorable cast of supporting players: Paula Lindberg,
Tristan Risk and David Lovgren.
plays into the film’s deliberately wary depiction of male/female relationships. In this film’s world—indeed, in both worlds depicted to date by the Soskas— men occupy the outward posi- tions of power despite being deeply disadvantaged and un- settled by the natural sexual power so confidently wielded by women, to the extent they can only engage with it by (in the case of Grant) overcoming it with drugs or (in the case of Billy) not stepping up to bat at all. Here, those few men who do make the effort to present themselves come off as coke-crazed hyper- bolists, like the party guest D. Black (Nelson Wong, who intro- duces himself as “a fuckin’ motherfucker”) or Dr. Walsh, who confides to his pretty protégé that she’s “going to be a great slasher! The adrenaline rush you get from slashing through a human being, it’s better than espresso!” The most developed of all the male characters is Billy, with Cupo’s performance conveying, touch- ingly, how the ugly life he’s cho- sen as a club manager has been beautified by the arrival of Mary, and the torment he suffers for involving her in it.
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Naturally the stone cold heart of the film resides with Katharine Isabelle, who adds a signature role to an already accomplished and impressively prolific career. (Born in late 1981, she already lists more than 100 film and TV credits on the IMDb.) Though the film was not shot sequentially, Isabelle succeeds in stacking a sequential performance that takes Mary from a promising, animated student to a frightened young woman feigning courage as the need to survive pushes her outside her comfort zones, then from rape survivor to icy avenger to sour, wise-cracking, criminal cynic and finally achieving an absolute flatline personality. (It’s the exact opposite of Billy’s arc, which shows him actually becom- ing flamboyant at one point in a misfired effort to attract her.) In one telling scene, Mary tries to achieve verbal intimacy with Billy (“Are you really afraid of me?”) but can’t, because his connec- tion with her is sexual, thus doomed. The closest she comes to admitting her own feelings for him is by not going through with the impulse murder of a dancer (Rikki Gagne, returning from DEAD HOOKER) she catches
fellating him; alternately, the clos- est he comes to admitting his own feelings is by swiping Grant’s video of Mary’s rape, which he uses as a masturbatory tool, purging some of his attendant guilt by incorporating a masoch- istic fantasy of getting caught in the act by an incandescently an- gry, scalpel-wielding Mary. It’s one of the genre’s most twisted and torturous love stories. On the other hand, Mary manages to show glimmers of warmth to both Detective Dolor (John Emmet Tracy), who is investigating Grant’s disappearance (when he admits to knowing that Grant is a monster and that she was his victim, she decides not to poison him), and to the club’s hulking bouncer, Lance (Twan Holliday), who keeps her warm and brings her fast food without being asked—both of whom have no personal agenda beyond looking out for her well-being. There are also elements of satire at work here, almost always played in the service of overstate- ment or outrage, the outrageous- ness of cartoonish, dehumanized characters and cartoonish, im- plausible situations—thus emo- tionally tied on some level to the
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