Descent

Who would have thought--Rosario Dawson signs up for the Gasper Noe treatment. Not nearly as provoking as it wants to be, Talia Lugacy’s Descent, one of the most talked-about films at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, is an empty-headed rape drama that doesn’t hold a candle to Mr. Noe’s troubling yet audacious Irreversible, an obvious antecedent. Taken from Mr. Noe’s long journey into the bowels of France are the deep shadows and garish reds, the overwhelming sense of doom without the pathos of tragedy, although the swirling cameras and overacting Europeans are replaced with petulant long takes and sullen looks of misery for Dawson, whose performance, while competent, lacks urgency.

In her sullen, quiet interpretation, Dawson, too old to be playing bookish, nineteen-year-old undergrads, never achieves the layering one sees in the performances of an Isabelle Huppert or even Jodie Foster in The Accused. Dawson’s Maya, a star philosophy student at an unnamed urban university, falls prey to a thoroughly repellent football player (Chad Faust), who seduces her one night at a house party. She agrees to go out with him and they share a quaint dinner, but he’s obviously not serious material. She returns home with him nevertheless and unfortunately begins to “hook up” with him, her seemingly flexible boundaries coming into contact with an awkward, passive-aggressive, and extremely vulnerable personality with a penchant for forcing himself upon young Latinas in his modest room.

Executed in a single, excruciating medium close-up of the two actors' faces with a single, unnecessary cutaway to entangled legs, the rape is the film’s raison d'être, but what a shallow one it is without being contextualized in any meaningful way. Cut to three months later, Dawson’s Maya is drifting into a life of aimless drug use, sexuality, and sadomasochistic club rounds. Did she tell anyone what happened? Why didn’t she call the cops? Of course, when Maya returns to school as a TA in a class that includes our football scrub/rapist, the opportunity for revenge presents itself. Fear not, castration is not in store, but the film’s final masochistic flourish, where Maya understands that no retribution can help her escape her pain, drew laughs at the screening I attended. A pity--the elements are in place for a film worth seeing, but their execution are sorely lacking.

                                                       Brandon Harris