Arizona Dream

ARIZONA DREAM   ***

Emir Kusturica

1993

IDEA:  After coming to Arizona on the behest of his Cadillac dealer uncle, a New York fish-counter falls in love with an eccentric woman who dreams of building her own flying machine.

BLURB:  Arizona Dream presents a porous universe in which reality, dream, and cinema produce and reciprocate each other in an irresolvable feedback loop. In this möbius strip of a cosmos, you can see a man mime the crop-duster scene from North by Northwest at a talent show before finding himself stalked by a real aircraft in an impromptu reproduction of the same scene. It’s a place where Chekhov’s gun is invoked and, of course, used. Where the combination of Johnny Depp, Faye Dunaway, Jerry Lewis, Vincent Gallo, Lili Taylor, sea turtles, Cadillacs, and Sirkian domestic psychodrama improbably exists. If this all makes Arizona Dream sound preciously self-reflexive or just downright arbitrary, that wouldn’t be inaccurate. Kusturica’s raucous direction fosters a tonal stew that vacillates between astringent, often slapstick black comedy and existential drama. The filmmaker has negotiated this balance better in other films; here, the manic tenor tends to cross the line into the ungainly and strident, clouding a narrative that often seems divorced from any kind of perceivable calculus. That being said, illogic also appears to be somewhat of the point. Arizona Dream deserves recognition for being a rare (semi)-mainstream film committed to the philosophy and aesthetics of surrealism. Similar to works by Buñuel or Jodorowsky, it creates a deliquescent, uncanny dream logic of free-floating symbols that speak in some indirect way to our deepest fears and desires. Kusturica and screenwriter David Atkins throw up signifiers both opaque and obvious (all the allusions to flight), inviting us to intuit connections more than interpret meaning. And if one can’t see the connection between Faye Dunaway ebulliently piloting a Wright brothers-style flyer and Jerry Lewis speaking Inukitut, well, some things just may never make sense.