The Car Man: An Auto-Erotic Thriller (review)

The Car Man: An Auto-Erotic Thriller. Conceived, directed and choreographed by Matthew Bourne. Adventures in Motion Pictures at the Ahmanson Theatre, Los Angeles. 18 October 2001.

Drawing on plotlines and characters from Georges Bizet's opera Carmen and Tay Garnett's film The Postman Always Rings Twice, Matthew Bourne creates a pastiche of desire, betrayal, and death. Bourne has always been fascinated by the possibilities offered by revising old stories and retelling them with movement and cross-gendered role-playing. Bourne's rather amazing revisionist flexibility is already announced in the puns of the title which playfully suggest the desires at stake in his re-telling of these narratives.

Inspired by the nineteenth-century Seville of Bizet's opera, The Car Man relocates the dramatic action to a mid-American town called Harmony, a mythic landscape where desire and fate inescapably collide, and where the languid summer air gives way to the pulsing and thrusting bodies of its testosterone-heightened youth. The action is structured around Dino Alfono's garage where muscle-bound men in clinging tee-shirts and tight jeans work on cars by day and then play fast and free with the town girls in the adjoining diner by night. Dino's garage has become what Lana Turner's character in The Postman Always Rings Twice had envisioned for Twin Oaks—the locus of all social (and sexual) interaction.

Bourne teasingly plays with the anticipated desires of the "Man Wanted" sign of The Postman Always Rings Twice by shifting the focus from the eroticized femme fatale to the male drifter. The femme fatale has become a Car Man, a drifter turned mechanic who swaggers onstage, a stereotype of rugged manliness in his wife-beater tee-shirt. Bizet's exoticized Spanish Gypsy becomes Luca (Paulo Kadow) who is no Gypsy cigarette girl, but all male virility—the man wanted not only to tune Dino's car engines, but by Lana (Saranne Curtin), Dino's dissatisfied wife, and by Angelo (Will Kemp).

Bourne focuses our attention on homoerotic desire. The polymorphous quality of the performance's sexuality is always in evidence whether in the cheeky dance in Act 1 when Luca shakes his bottom in another man's face, or when two men rigorously bump and grind beneath Luca, clad in Lana's pink dressing gown and smoking a cigarette after their first sexual interlude. Luca and Angelo's feeling for each other is unmistakable and has a powerful erotic charge even before their desire takes shape in one of Dino's parked cars. Bourne's production is very much about reframing desire in homoerotic terms and his most suggestive accomplishment is his exploration of the explosive homosexual chemistry of Luca and Angelo.

Alert to the automotive puns of Bourne's title and to the locus of the action, it is intriguing to consider how Bourne's revision of the earlier works foregrounds the position of the woman as the vehicle for male homosociality. The woman in both Carmen and The Postman Always Rings Twice is the site of conflict for the men; she is the object of desire, the site where man's desire is displaced and circulates more comfortably controlled. Bourne creates a new erotic triangle wherein desire is ever shifting (Lana-Luca-Dino, Rita-Angelo-Luca, Luca-Angelo-Lana/Rita). Bourne heightens the complexity of what happens within these triangles in the re-iterations (frenzied social dances with sharp thrusts and high-energy leaps, violent pushing, and steamy pulsating) of the troupe members which mirror and magnify how (heterosexual) desire intersects with another (homosexual) configuration of desires.

Lez Brotherston's décor is richly suggestive of the filmic inspiration for the production with its scenic panels. From the opening scene where Harmony is projected on a screen that reads simultaneously as a town landmark, billboard, and drive-in movie screen, Brotherston's set stages fantasy as a scene. Bourne's cinematic leanings are most powerful in his deft...