Awash with striking imagery, Nina Menkes’s indelible portrait of alienated womanhood counters the glitz of nocturnal Las Vegas with its daytime loneliness. Sullenly glamorous, the blood-red claws sported by Tinka Menkes’s croupier evokes a gesture of resistance against the drudgery of casino life.
Drifting through transient terrains on foot and by train and boat, Nina Menkes’s hypnotic odyssey evokes unspoken feelings of exile and alienation through trance-like imagery. As the vagabond heroine, the enigmatic aura of her real-life sister Tinka Menkes strikes a powerful, autobiographical cord.
Casting her spellbinding sister as an officer investigating a murder, Nina Menkes journeys into a sandstorm of military and sexual violence. Refusing resolution, this fascinating film excavates an atmosphere of haunting that is aswirl with dreamlike imagery and mesmeric incantation.
An atmospheric fever dream unfurling over motel rooms and prison cells, Nina Menkes’s groundbreaking first feature traces the cyclical nature of exploitation. Simmering with rage, Tinka Menkes’s potent evocation of a fractured female psyche unveils the emotional ravage of transactional encounters.
