Film

Painted Heart (1992)

Director: Michael Taav

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Taav's first feature occupies the same setting and psychological territory as David Lynch's visions of small-town America. About a love triangle, involving house painter Wesley (Patton), his boss Willie (Pastorelli) and Willie's sensitive, vulnerable wife Margaret (Neuwirth), the film turns into a picture of hidden desires, romantic dreams and dangerous obsessions. A boy is saved from his drunken father by his mother's offer of sex; using her lipstick he colours a newspaper ad that reads, 'With these clothes you'll have no problems.' Thirty years later, an agitated Wesley breaks into Margaret's house and, before leaving lipstick as a present, tells her, 'I've got some ideas I don't know what to do with.' An affair develops: Margaret projects years of romantic longing on to her new lover, while the paranoid Wesley, fearing discovery, spies on Willie's own clandestine activities. At this stage, it's not clear whose disturbing childhood we've seen. The consequences, though, are alarmingly clear - 'The Lipstick Killer' is on the loose. An unsettling film in which ideas, tone and texture unite with quietly confident storytelling.

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