But more importantly, it is employed for the commonplace image of love as a burning passion. Fire alludes to the hell of a world the lovers crave to run away from. Living off the world, loving on the roadįrom the opening credits, kickstarted by the lighting of a match, fire acts as a visual leitmotif for the entire movie. The most recurrent of the many songs featured in the soundtrack and thus the most closely associated with the movie. The plot soon takes on a psychoanalytical dimension, setting itself up as a portrayal of an Electra complex. The showdown is inevitable: will love help to come of age?Ĭhris Isaak’s soft rock hit Wicked Game. But among the resulting parade of Felliniesque caricatures, the witchy, villainous mother will always stand out. The heroine, in particular, tries to transfigure reality into the manageable fantasy of The Wizard of Oz, to the point where some of the movie’s characters retrace those of the book. The one way the protagonists find to swerve around all of this is escapism.

And as a consequence, the world takes on a nightmarish look in its surreal cruelty. Death can break into the love getaway at any moment. Its appearances are short-lived, few and far between, but shocking nonetheless. Ballard-like car crashes, violence explodes all throughout the movie. Rather, it expresses its full potential in the hyperbolic depiction of violence, both abhorrent and grotesque.įrom bare-hands manslaughters to J. And since it remains, at heart, a thriller, its “cartoon-like ferocity” ( as critic Derek Malcolm called it) does not confine itself to style and experimentation. Wild at Heart is a movie full of sound and fury, with near-numbing effects. “This world is only gonna break your heart…”

With its constant patch-working, and its distaste for human well-being on screen, Wild at Heart has dressed up American independent cinema for an ultra-violent breakthrough: Quentin Tarantino. Through its contradictions, the movie aims to overturn and break the boundaries between all genres. The swinging in tone, mood, and rhythm is continuous.

As the plot alternates between Eros and Thanatos, the soundtrack shifts seamlessly from the most disparate kinds of music: soft rock, thrash metal, bebop, Richard Strauss, and, of course, the “King of Rock and Roll”.

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