THE RAPTURE @ 35 - SPOLIERS!

Sharon works in a call centre retrieving phone numbers for other people. Her workday is repeating that five second script for hours. By night she rides the passenger seat of her mate Vic's convertable as they cruise the L.A. strips for play pals. Then at all hours, they re-enact the juicy bits from Sodom and Gomorrah. Then it's back to "please hold for the number". Then, one of her noctural escapades she sees an extraordinary tattoo on a woman's back. It's a vivid pearl by a stream. The woman tells Sharon that its meaning has to do with the second coming of Jesus Christ. 

This loads Sharon up for closer listening to the mini cabal of apocalyptic Christians in the canteen at work. They see through her attempts at infiltration but then she does have the dream, that they all talk of sharing, about the pearl. Scene by scene, Sharon goes from restless frustration to high-charge spiritual wealth. Following a disaster in her life, some years on, she travels to the desert with her young daughter to meet the Apocalypse.

This fable is told so straight it derails into the bizarre. The redemption story of the first act is plain enough sailing but as soon as Sharon's religious awakening sets in and her zeal alters her life completely we start wondering what kind of movie we're watching. Is it an exercise in extended irony? Is it a genuine religious essa    y? It is to Mimi Rogers' credit that Sharon's transition feels less like a claimed miracle than a redirection of her energy from one way of life to another. Her initial cynicism becomes a determined hopefulness. Without this committed performance this story would be a rancid conversion story. We need to follow her from that self retooling into the great test of the middle act without being overwhelmed by our own cynicism. Does it work? I think that depends on the viewer's won religiosity.

Spoilers follow!

This was screenwriter Michael Tolkin's directorial debut. Between the hits of Gleaming the Cube and the 1992's massive The Player, he chose this modestly budgeted tale of gigantic deeds. It was impossible to sell to mainstream audiences and barely made it through the festival circuit and arthouse avenues. Woman gets religion, kills own daughter and faces God. Oh, and throw in a literal rendition of the Book of Revelation. Tough enough without Sharon's final decision which would set the least religious (like me) audiences into a slough of horror.

And as abrupt as her final defiance feels and how that makes it seem rushed, it has a very effective telescoping in the opening scene in which a glacial tracking camera passes by steel grey partitions of people in headsets constantly repeating a short script. It's as though Matthew Barney wanted to express the notion of Purgatory. Purgatory or Limbo (my familiarity with this nonsense is barely extant) is where she finally stands, having denied love of a God that drove her to atrocity. We don't need the final shot before the credits to linger, we've already seen how it plays. If Tolkin had written her returning to the call centre we would come to the same conclusion. 

But that is where this film defies its audience to stay with it. If the conversion was hard to witness, this self-sentencing is both an act of integrity and one of utter futiliy. When I showed this at a movie night, one of thesemi-regular crew, an Anglican priest in training, approached me afterwards and called it a very honest story. I'm still unsure of what she meant by that, but the film's refusal to punch down the way that some of its characters do does lend its plainness of touch a sense of sincere interest. (The same person came to see REC and through a grin said, "that was wicked!")

Tolkin imbues the pallet with a kind of magic hour gold, whether in Californian motel rooms or the dry wilderness of Sharon's sacrifice, giving the whole running time a kind of base comfort. When we start to see angels and apocalyptic horsemen across the horizon or standing on bitumen highways it gives us pause to recall how much of a horror fiction the Bible is (read the last book and see).

An acquaintance of mine worked at the Valhalla in Northcote and reported that when some creepy Christian types came to buy tickets for the Rapture he had to tell them that they'd just missed it. True story, but it only makes me wonder how this film would be received in the America of Christian Nationalism, by which the tenets of the religion are subordinate to the branding that nourishes mass bigotry and oppression. The movie wasn't made for people who think that the Bible was written in English or anyone who would comprehend Sharon murdering her child as virtuous. This movie was not made for people who do not know their own holy book. It wasn't made for anyone who would simply dismiss the very end as a moment of  "serves her right". It was made for anyone who would witness and question themselves. That's the hardest sell of all when it comes to a night at the movies. That's why The Rapture is one of my favourite films of the '90s.

Viewing notes: I watched my ancient DVD of this one in absence of anything better quality (though it's pretty swish for a DVD). It's long out of print on physical media but can be rented online at sources like Prime.

Various Apocaylpses Part 2: THE RAPTURE

Sharon has a stultifiying job at a call centre, serving the lazy and the idle by linking them to the phone numbers they seek. She's one of many among the dingy partitions. If this were god's job, and according to popular imagination it might as well be, no one would want it. She compensates with nights in Babylon, taking her drugs in the nose and sexual sparing anywhere else, coupling and recoupling. During one such sensual whirl she is mesmerised by the sight of an extremely elaborate tattoo on a woman's back of a pearl in a very odd looking setting. She asks about it and is only further intrigued by its owner's vague answer.

Further investigation leads her to the culty side of the fundamentalist Christian street and soon she finds some of these at the call centre, lunching together in the canteen and speaking in whispers. Outside of work she is increasingly haunted about her own dissolute lifestyle and begins to pursue the path, going from a backfiring slight toetesting to all out epiphany. She drags her most recent regular partner (a pre-X Files David Duchovny) from his own decadence into a dustless Christian marriage. They have a daughter. David suits up and eventually becomes a manager. Things, very bad things happen.

Sharon receives what she is convinced is an epiphany she takes her daughter to the desert, camps out by a mountain and waits for what she insists is the imminent apocalypse. Another non-spoily bad thing happens which brings the local sheriff into the picture. Then the apocalypse happens.

That bit isn't a spoiler as it's in the title. The notion relates to an interpretation of an old testament verse that suggests to the eager reader that at the point of the cataclysm, the faithful of the world will be transported to heaven. Here's the interesting thing about this film's presentation of this: it's literal. Act three is all Book of Revelation with additional dialogue. While the first two acts play like a candid Christian redemption tale the last one rolls out everything from the last book of the Bible as though it's really happening. But is it?

This film is a kind of necker cube. Look at it now and it's receding. Look again and it's advancing. What looks at first like a mega budget school pageant can very easily take on the icy tinge of psychosis. Sharon (Mim Rogers in her career's role of roles) descends through shock into a realm that she sees as biblical and ultimately blissful that you get a real sense that when she does the bad deed (and it is bad) she is aware of it's monstrousness as a human but convinced of its rectitude as a potential candidate for the rapture.

So which is it? Me, I'm an atheist, I'm incapable of accepting the events as literal truth without the same suspension of disbelief as I use with horror or science fiction. When I screened this at Shadows, one of the small but appreciative audience was an Anglican seminarian who praised the film for its "honesty". What she meant by that referred to my introduction which mentioned that writer/director Michael Tolkin, a Jewish-raised atheist who wanted to see what extreme religious belief looked like when played out for real. And it is honest. There are no moments of snidery here and the risk that the audience will only take what it sees one or the other way is clear and enormous. Whether this as a sobering parable of faith or psychiatry you will here find power and thought. It's not just honest, it's brave.