Rhinoceros Eyes

Starring Michael Pitt and Paige Turco. Rated 14A. Opens Friday, March 31, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

Rhinoceros Eyes is an exercise in opulent strangeness, with saving moments of visual brilliance, and it will infuriate at least as many moviegoers as it wins over.

Michael Pitt, who has yet to play a role straight enough to let us gauge what he can do (one of his last outings was as the Kurt Cobain-like character in Last Days), stars as the oddly named Chep, whose whole world is the dilapidated Toronto prop house he rarely leaves. Let's put it this way: if the young protagonist of Franí§ois Truffaut's The Wild Child had been raised by art directors rather than wolves, he might have turned out something like this: a holy innocent with art deco lamps and a 20-kilogram cherry.

Chep speaks, a little anyway, but his only frame of verbal reference seems to be the crappy melodrama currently (and forever) playing at the local third-run cinema, where he studiously ignores the attentions of a similarly antisocial box-office clerk (Nadia Litz). If his lines can't be lifted from the movie he's just seen, he doesn't know what to say. His limits, and his resourcefulness, are tested when a beautiful designer (Paige Turco) comes into the shop one night looking for the orbs of the film's title. Her demands for authenticity then become even more obscure-to a dangerous degree.

Things reach a turning point when the longhaired lad is dragged out on Halloween by his bosses, the foul-mouthed Bundy (Matt Servitto) and the forever stoned Hamish (James Allodi), who plunk a rubber likeness of old-school wrestler and grade-Z movie actor Tor Johnson on his head. The mask presumably gives him courage for acts he would otherwise avoid, including a B&E at a neighbour's house, where a crazy lady (Jackie Burroughs) ritually abuses old suitors and is spied dancing with the detective (Queer as Folk's Gale Harold) sent to investigate Chep's transgressions.

Lost yet? Actually seeing the movie won't help you. But for the many baffling interludes, there are a number of poignant or at least striking images. Most of these come during the love-action animated segments that represent increasingly psychotic episodes. These are heavily influenced by weird Czech director Jan Svankmajer, but the cockeyed combination of wistful comedy, creepy hints of horror, and dogged obscurantism has a unique tang of its own-not that unique always means good. Still, as with anyone rummaging through old props, it depends on what you're looking for.

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