THE HEART OF MIDNIGHT – I don’t do many re-watches, but over the last few years ‘The Heart Of Midnight’ has gone on around Autumn. Who knows? There’s something about the spidery piano theme that makes me think of gardens full of falling leaves, so it could just be as easy as that. The film itself stars Jennifer Jason Leigh as a troubled woman who inherits an abandoned sex club from her uncle. It seems he was ‘that’ kind of uncle – we see just how creepy later in the film, as evidence of his abuse flickers up on basement video screens. Before then, unpleasant things happen as they would in any abandoned sex club. Leigh’s rape at the hands of a bunch of knuckle dragging savages heralds the arrival of shifty Peter Coyote, and from there the narrative takes us through a neo-noirish terrain of head games and ambiguous intent. The big mystery at the heart of ‘The Heart Of Midnight’ is only moderately interesting, but what is interesting is the film’s sheer oddness. It strains for the surreal in ways that sometimes seem a bit obvious (that waterbed full of eye balls etc), but the cumulative effect is heady. A lot of its atmosphere has to do with the set design; the menstrual red corridors seem straight out of David Lynch and are a constant and oppressive presence. And what’s with all those grimy rooms full of apples? “That looks pretty symbolic,” you can imagine the art director saying, but somehow it doesn’t seem lame. If I had to pin down my fascination, I’d say there’s just something about the way it’s simultaneously stagey and hypnotic that keeps hooking me back in. It’s not a perfect film, but it’s eerie, strange and vaguely (and obviously, I guess) sleazy, and both Jennifer Jason Leigh and Peter Coyote are very good in their roles and give the film some stature.
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