On Criterion, I watched The Linguini Incident, a 1991 indie film directed by Richard Shepard (Cool Blue), an offbeat forgotten movie where Rosanna Arquette and David Bowie work at a trendy SoHo restaurant with a pretentious hipness, and she’s a waitress named Lucy whose grandfather worked with Harry Houdini as his agent, and she’s trying to become an escape artist, practicing with a noose, a straitjacket, and being locked in a sack. He’s a British undocumented immigrant named Monte, who is a pathological liar and has a quietly psychotic edge, looking for someone to quickly marry for a green card before he gets sent back. And they both are plotting to rob the trendy restaurant because it rakes in cash every night.
It’s weird to watch a movie where David Bowie is trying to play a regular person, albeit an attractive non-violent psycho. He’s still handsome and charming, but his rock star icon status makes it hard to see him as a struggling immigrant in NYC. I could believe him as a vampire in The Hunger or as Andy Warhol in Basquiat, but not as a guy who works as a bartender.
I like how quirky and sexy and funny Rosanna Arquette is, she’s really charming in this. I see this movie as like a sequel to her character in 1985’s Desperately Seeking Susan, after she as Roberta leaves her yuppie husband to live with boho Aidan Quinn in his barren loft and becomes a magician’s assistant in a downtown dive. I see her as Roberta having broken up with him, trying to become a magician of her own through the escape arts, and getting by on her waitress job while living with her roommate Vivian (Eszter Balint) in an old apartment. I much preferred the friend interactions of Lucy and Vivian, as they had a nice chemistry of downtown NYC girlfriends living together.
It’s an OK movie, more just interesting for the leads and depiction of early 90s downtown NYC in the indie movie boom.
