Chain of Desire Reviews

In the style of LA RONDE, writer/director Temistocles Lopez's character-star-studded drama examines the linked love lives of denizens of a downtown New York dance club. Well acted throughout, it's occasionally amusing. More often, it's plain gross, preachy, and never quite compelling. DESIRE can barely disguise a political agenda that bends the film away from art and into agitprop. The tone is comically satirical when it comes to the various white heterosexual males in the film, who are, to a man, scheming, deluded, swinish and insensitive. Yet the tone switches to mawkish earnestness when it comes to everyone else; the women are all sadly beautiful and clear-eyed, and the ethnic characters, are sentimentalized, especially Jesus, in his tenement bathtub dreaming of opening his own "salsa laundry." The gays are all caring nurturers who spend all their time hugging and kissing, when they're not out marching for AIDS awareness. The overall effect, instead of recalling the weary sadness of Ophuls, comes closer to the hysterical horror of Bambi and the hunters.