New on DVD

'R Xmas (2001)

After a couple of recent narrative misfires, maverick filmmaker Abel Ferrara (Bad Lieuetenent, The Funeral) rediscovers his footing in 'R Xmas. Although 'R Xmas premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001, the film did not unspool in the U.S. until November 2002, when it was released in tape and DVD formats at the same time it played a limited theatrical run in New York and Los Angeles. The movie finds Ferrara reclaiming his dibs on the jagged emotional turf that exists between the sacred and the profane. If Ferrara were a sentimentalist, this would be his Christmas Carol, his scared-straight glance at Christmases past and future. Instead, Ferrara uses his gritty-eyed urban realism to home in on the Christmas Eve experiences of a young married couple (played by Lillo Brancato Jr. and The Sopranos' Drea de Matteo, in a riveting performance). This immigrant couple (he's Dominican, she's Puerto Rican) pursue their American Dream in New York City by dealing large quantities of drugs, which supports their upscale lifestyle and private school for their doted-upon only child. However, much like Tony Soprano, Ferrara's couple is just beginning to perceive that, among other things, they are going to have a hard time explaining their income when career day roles around at the private school. Like the best of Ferrara's work, 'R Xmas shows a deep fascination with the quotidian aspects of life, although here so much of the routine involves the assembly-line preparation of drugs for mass sale. The film's visual coup de grâce is its undulating river of lap dissolves that fades one action into the next and so on. The technique gives the film an inexorable trajectory, foggy but ever moving (and helped along by a strong score by Schooly D). In opening and closing titles, Ferrara sets the movie in December 1993 at the end of David Dinkins' mayoral term and the beginning of America's mayor Rudy Guiliani's term -- when, according to Ferrara, drug-dealing was forced back underground. Some viewers will be frustrated by the film's final words: "To be cont." Real Ferrara fans, however, will be excited by the promise of Christmases future.