Rae, the battered sexpot played by Christina Ricci in Craig Brewer’s new film Black Snake Moan, may go down in cinematic history as one of the iconic visions of female eroticism that linger in the public imagination for decades.
Remember the bikini-and-dagger-clad Ursula Andress stepping from crystal-blue waters as the original Bond girl, Honey Ryder? Or Jane Fonda doing as she pleased with those massive laser guns as the Space-age cowgirl Barbarella? Or even Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia in gold bikini and chains as Jabba the Hut’s prisoner in Return of the Jedi?
Ricci tows a similar line as the prisoner of a washed-up singer in Black Snake Moan, an ode to the Blues and the dirty south. Her character, a redneck nymphomaniac named Rae, who’s swollen and bruised from a recent thrashing, scampers about in a pair of worn white panties and a torn grey crop-top bearing American and Confederate flags barely containing her breasts.
A slightly off-tune Samuel Jackson plays Lazarus, a tattered, god-fearing Blues musician. Lazarus no longer sings the blues, mainly because he’s surrendered to them. Recently separated from a cheating wife who took off with his younger brother, Lazarus lives with his crops, his bible, a bottle of moonshine and a tendency to lash out against anyone who crosses him.
Review:
Black Snake Moan
Directed by Craig Brewer
Starring Samuel L. Jackson and Christina Ricci
Rating: VVV / VVVVV
After discovering Rae bloodied, unconscious and laid out in his path after a night of debauchery, Lazarus makes it his mission to deliver the nymph from wickedness-starting by chaining her to his radiator.
Brewer’s film is built around this sort of kinky, atmospheric exorcism, complete with demonic spells of unbridled horniness. Rae’s chains stand in for rosary beads, moonshine for holy water, and blues for gospel. In a central moment in the film, a half-conscious Rae struggles with her chains until they completely engulf her. These chains will eventually become her, and the movie for that matter.
It’s too bad the chains come off so early in the film, because Ricci is left fidgety without them. Brewer seems anxious to fill the feature with subplots, side-characters like Rae’s neurotic boyfriend played by Justin Timberlake, and a Blues motif, none of which live up to the tug-of-war at the film’s centre.
