A really key film for the early 1980s, with its emphasis on male vanity,
solipsism and sex as commerce. It looks like designer chic, but that's
part of the experiment - it's probing and dissecting its own pop
fashionability. Like many Schrader films, it weds its themes to a
vaguely unsatisfactory thriller plot which never threatens to raise
the temperature. But Gere has never been more iconic and alive than in
this disarmingly bold character study. Perhaps the quintessential
Schrader, which resonates in look and tone through many of his later
works.
