Rosenthal: Excerpt from Manhatten

I just finished watching “What About Me.” Rachel Amadeo produced, wrote, directed and starred. It was just as good as “Stranger Than Paradise” so why not famous? After I finished I looked online, which was wrong, to feed mania for public life in which everyone’s a star. Wrong to let gossip consume. Found pictures of her and her little boy and husband at a gallery opening. So she’s known in a certain circle. Maybe she’s been busy with child-rearing? Did the movie in ‘93, made a short in ‘98. So she still has her hand in. “What About Me” follows a woman’s demise. Through a fast series of brutal incidents she becomes homeless. Unschooled but passionately committed actors combine with black-and-white images of Lower East Side to create a stark beauty. Things you don’t want to happen, do—she’s robbed, raped, run over. I stopped watching in the middle the other night, saying to Henry, You know she’s about to get hooked on crack and then she’ll have to turn tricks. But it turns out I was wrong. That is something to be grateful for. Everyone loves Lisa. Despite her body odor, her rags, her not fitting in, her complete lack of confidence. There are those who hate her, but hate is the ultimate perversion of love, like the hate of the landlord who rapes her and throws her out. He hates the fact that she makes him feel, so he tries to destroy the source of the feeling. Everyone, except those perverted by hate, loves Lisa—the auntie who dies, the women who knock her over with their motorcycle, Paul the goodhearted hipster, Nick the homeless vet, brother Vito who arrives too late. They have no words for their love. Neither does the camera. It offers pictures. The way she lays out her doll collection for sale. The way she creeps along the streets of Manhatten in her layers of rags. Her gaunt, elegant face. Blood streams down her right temple after she’s run over by the motorcycle. A good Samaritan named Paul takes her in, gives her a bath. She hides in the bathroom, staring at her stunned reflection, ribs poking through, black matted hair hanging down—smears talc to a smooth death mask. Asks Paul to take her to the Statue of Liberty—who also has a streak down her right temple—yes it is a wound. Liberty is Lisa is Mary is Jesus. The equals signs fly from freedom to suffering like Lisa flung from mainstream to marginal. The credits are rolling. See them go up and up, off the screen and into the black. End of story. Not quite. Why is it, really, that the characters, and the relationships between the characters, are so compelling, when no one seems schooled. It’s because Rachel the writer/director/producer/actress is inside Lisa the character, inhabiting her. Rachel communicates her intense, single-pointed demand that Lisa be taken seriously by staring out of Lisa’s eyes, speaking Lisa’s few and slow but blunt words, to everyone Lisa comes into contact with—musicians and artists of the Lower East Side circa early 90s, pals of Rachel’s, I assume, whom Rachel cast for her low-budget movie, these friends of Rachel’s who become Lisa’s lovers. Because everyone as I said is Lisa’s helpless lover. Having fallen hopelessly in love with a desperate woman. A woman of desperate circumstances. A woman brutalized by our world. We are wedded to her fate.