Painted Angels
Canada/UK 1997
Reviewed by Julianne Pidduck
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
The American West, the 1870s. Annie Ryan runs a brothel in a tiny isolated outpost. When Maude, one of Annie's 'girls', is murdered, German dancer Katya arrives to replace her. Deeply shaken by Maude's death, Eileen (an Irish immigrant) divides the murdered woman's paltry belongings among the other five prostitutes. Bonded by their immigrant pasts, Eileen and Katya become close friends. Stolid Nettie has been forced into prostitution to support her drunken disabled husband and small son. Acting as a nurse for the other women, Nettie brings her son to Annie's establishment when his father is unable to care for him. Meanwhile, the ageing Ada is eclipsed in the customers' affections by the younger Georgie and Katya. When Ada's last regular customer chooses Georgie instead, Ada must go to work at a rougher brothel to support her three children.
After Ada's departure and a random murder in the pool hall, Katya begins seeing ghosts. Eileen is drawn into Katya's superstitious trance when she learns her entire family has perished in the Irish potato famine. After a riotous evening with a visiting cabaret troupe, the two take poison in a suicide pact. Eileen dies, but Katya recovers. Feeling that this is no place for a child, Nettie sends her son away. When Ada is attacked by a customer, her daughter steps in to fill the vacancy at Annie's. Georgie finally sets off for the city, while Katya leaves town with the travelling performers.
Review
Beginning with the summary execution of a 'fancy woman', Painted Angels takes up the trail of brothel revisionism recently trod by Unforgiven. With his debut feature, writer/director Jon Sanders seeks to paint the lost stories of immigrants and prostitutes back into the generic landscape of the Wild West. Nothing could be further from the spoofy flounce and heaving bosoms of such recent 90s 'spaghetti strap' Westerns as Bad Girls, The Quick and the Dead and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Instead, Painted Angels has more in common with Unforgiven's gimlet-eyed whores and the corrective feminist realism of The Ballad of Little Jo, its setting even recalling McCabe & Mrs. Miller's murky frontier town.
Painted Angels concentrates on the workaday world of gritty sweating bodies, showing a steady stream of cowboys lining up for servicing on a Saturday night. Madam Annie (a tough performance by Brenda Fricker) treats her 'girls' according to their earning power. When the ageing Ada's last regular opts for teenage Georgie, Annie tells the young girl unsentimentally, "He's had enough of her. They all have. You're what they want, fresh meat." Painted Angels offers no easy escape from being poor, female and an immigrant in the land of opportunity. In a nasty turn that encapsulates the film's frying-pan-on-skull morality, Ada's barely adolescent daughter joins Annie's ranks when her mother is too old to work.
Sanders, who co-wrote the screenplay with his wife Anna Mottram (who plays Ada) keeps the narrative line, mise en scène and soundscape threadbare to suggest the barrenness of the women's existence. The tableau structure combines a curious dramatic minimalism with heightened theatrical moments. It opens with Maude applying her elaborate make-up in the mirror (the first of several literal scenes highlighting how 'fancy women' are made-up, not born). Felled by a shot in the back, Maude's demise prompts not a whisper of response from the town - the chance of revenge or redemption raised (if ultimately defeated) in Unforgiven doesn't enter the frame here. Rather, the action remains indoors in the company of the five women, with a wake scene shot with characteristically static camerawork and relentlessly long takes. Eileen - Bronagh Gallagher of The Commitments fame - sings a strangely wooden ballad in her friend's honour. Sanders uses these 'live' numbers (echoed by a bizarre Grecian pageant and a travelling cabaret) to pierce the film's stultifying silence (there is almost no non-diegetic music or even ambient sound) and posed, static performance style. The result is a schizophrenic tension between the paucity of human comfort and a creeping hysteria that erupts through Katya's strange fits and trances.
The only respite from this devastating ambience rests with the women's fragile community, exemplified by the ritual exchange of a few prized possessions after Maude's death and at Ada's departure. Against the grain of a dramatic tone and structure that discourages empathy, the ensemble cast salvages some moments of warmth, if not levity. Katya and Eileen's bond, arising from their shared immigrant pasts, strikes a chord, although the script labours to recount Katya's difficult cross-Atlantic voyage and the Irish potato famine. Kelly McGillis brings dignity to the long-suffering Nettie who ministers to the other women.
Ultimately, despite Painted Angels' opting for the intimate dynamics of the brothel rather than the genre's more customary pleasures of action and landscape, the characters lack the spunk, humour or even pathos needed to transform document into drama. Eileen alone emerges as a rounded character through Gallagher's full-blooded performance - sadly, McGillis' and especially Fricker's capacities are wasted in one-dimensional roles. Scripted as doormats in the inexorable march of history, these 'painted angels' fall prey to over-ambitious formal devices and the script's worthiness.
Credits
- Producers
- Ann Scott
- Christina Jennings
- Stephen Onda
- Screenplay
- Anna Mottram
- Jon Sanders
- Director of Photography
- Gerald Packer
- Editor
- Maysoon Pachachi
- Production Designer
- Hayden Griffin
- Music
- Douglas Finch
- ©Prairie Doves Inc./Prairie Doves UK Ltd
- Production Companies
- Cinepix Properties present a Shaftesbury Films/Greenpoint Films/Heartland Motion Pictures production
- Produced with the participation of British Screen/SaskFILM/ Saskatchewan Opportunities Corporation/ Téléfilm Canada and in association with BBC Films
- Developed in association with First Film Foundation/Diverse Productions
- Developed with the assistance of British Screen Finance Ltd. (London, England) and with the support of The European Script Fund
- Produced with the assistance of The Government of Canada - Canadian Film or
- Video Production Tax Credit program and The Saskatchewan Future Skills program and in association with TMN - The Movie Network and SuperChannel
- Executive Producer
- BBC Films:
- Mark Shivas
- Line Producer
- Laurie McLarty
- Associate Producers
- Laurence Bowen
- Scott Garvie
- Production Co-ordinator
- Lisa King
- Production Manager
- Mark Reid
- Location Manager
- Corey Robson
- Post-production Supervisors
- UK:
- Miranda Jones
- Canada:
- Laura Harbin
- Assistant Directors
- Woody Sidarous
- Catherine Middleton
- Dwain Dupley
- Script Supervisor
- Cathy Kmita
- Casting
- Canada:
- Deirdre Bowen
- UK:
- Leo Davis
- Saskatchewan:
- Lee Sanders
- Additional Dialogue
- Jeremy Seabrook
- Script Consultant
- Walter Donahue
- Art Director
- Jim Phillips
- Set Decorator
- Ian Greig
- Costume Designer
- Madeleine Stewart
- Set Supervisor
- Koreen Heaver
- Make-up Artist
- Jenny Shircore
- Titles Design
- Chris Allies
- Music Performed by
- The Continuum Ensemble
- Conductor
- Neil Richardson
- Music Consultant
- Rodney Newton
- Soundtrack
- "My Laggan Love" (Irish trad), performed by Bronagh Gallagher; "Katya's Theme" inspired by "Winterreise" by Franz Schubert
- Choreography
- Anna Mottram
- Rosy Sanders
- Production Sound Mixer
- William Butler
- Dubbing Mixer
- Hugh Strain
- Sound Editor
- Danny Hambrook
- Dialogue Editor
- Stewart Henderson
- Foley
- Editor:
- Paul Bingley-Hall
- Head Animal Wrangler
- John Scott
- Animal Wranglers
- Cathy Sutherland
- Gwen Nelson
- Bud Hamilton
- Warren Butterfield
- Don Butterfield
- Cast
- Brenda Fricker
- Annie Ryan
- Kelly McGillis
- Nettie
- Meret Becker
- Katya
- Bronagh Gallagher
- Eileen
- Lisa Jakub
- Georgie
- Anna Mottram
- Ada
- Josiah Wu
- Louie
- Kent Allen
- Doctor Belcher
- Greg Lawson
- Johnny Dow
- Elyssa Dombowsky
- Julia
- Kieran Semple
- Billy
- Bruce McFee
- Frank McGuinn
- Dwayne Brenna
- Oscar
- Alan Bratt
- Sam
- Michael Burns
- Joe
- Bob Clout
- judge
- Michelle Sereda
- Mazeppa
- Andrea Rodrigue
- Olinska
- Adnan Adrovic
- Wayne Apostle
- Ian Black
- Harold Gillespie
- Susan Hamann
- Charlotte Kallichuk
- Tamara Lapchuk
- Iain MacLean
- Kristian Marken
- Wendy McDonald
- David McIntyre
- Greg McKinnon
- Billy Morton
- Darren Muscoby
- Ian Nestegaard-Paul
- Juanita Vogelgesang
- Dimitri Van Zwanenberg
- Certificate
- 12
- Distributor
- Artificial Eye Film Company
- 9,872 feet
- 109 minutes 41 seconds
- Dolby
- In Colour