USA,
1993, 98 min
Shown in 1993
CREDITS
- dir
-
Philip Haas
- prod
-
Frederick Zallo, Dylan Sellers
- scr
-
Philip Haas, Brenda Haas
- cam
-
Bernard Zitzermann, Jean de Segonzac
- editor
-
Brenda Haas
- cast
-
James Spader, Mandy Patinkin, M. Emmet Walsh, Charles Durning, Joel Grey
- source
-
I.R.S. Releasing
-
COMMENTS
Philip Haas in person.
OTHER
Zipping around the curves of the country road in his red BMW with the last $10,000 of an inherited bundle in the glove compartment, Nashe (Mandy Patinkin, The Princess Bride) stops for a bloodied man staggering along the roadside. Enter Pozzi (James Spader, sex, lies, and videotape), lowlife charmer and professional card player, talking a blue streak about his recent bad luck in getting robbed of his winnings. That he's broke is “tragic” because he has to forfeit a sure-win game the next day with two millionaires, the worst card players he's ever encountered. Nashe offers to back him and together they enter the gates of the millionaires' country estate into a disorienting world where nothing is as it seems and each move is a gamble, a step further into the labyrinthine plot. The millionaires (Charles Durning and Joel Grey), eccentric down to their matching white suits, end up “employing” Pozzi and Nashe to build their latest whim—a wall of ten thousand stones. But the closer they get to finishing the wall, the more entangled they become in a web of everchanging rules. A chilling and intelligent first feature by documentary filmmaker Philip Haas (Stones and Flies, SFIFF 1989; The Giant Woman and the Lightning Man, SFIFF 1990), The Music of Chance, adapted from the Paul Auster novel, infuses a distinctly American, present-day setting with elements of the sinister and absurd, provoking unnerving questions about power and insidious manipulation, self-determination, fate and fair play.
—Daphne Beal
FACTOID #300
When she attended the 1980 San Francisco International Film Festival for a tribute, Federico Fellini’s wife and muse Giulietta Masina, admitted that she accepted a bit part in the American film The Madwoman of Chaillot (despite the fact that she could not speak English) just so she could get costar Katherine Hepburn’s autograph.
