But the equation of Vegas, the gambling Mecca, with western values strikes me as tendentious. It's a rich mix, made all the headier by Lepage's constant cinematic references: Robert Altman's Nashville, Eisenstein's ¡Que Viva Mexico!, Von Stroheim's Greed. And, while coalition soldiers undergo training in a fake Iraqi village, Bush appears on television solemnly vindicating war. An immigrant chambermaid, terrified she has a fatal illness, is driven to steal in order to get medical advice. A Quebecois couple, hastily married by an Elvis impersonator, confront their incompatibility. A British TV exec finds his old gambling addiction ruinously reignited. Numerous lives intersect in a plush hotel. Accordingly, he sets this piece in Las Vegas, that gaudy hymn to illusion, and the surrounding desert at the start of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But his ambitious new 150-minute piece, the start of a tetralogy with playing-card motifs, leaves me in two minds: admiration for the dazzling technical means, but bewilderment over the desired intellectual ends.įor Lepage, Spades are a symbol of war. When style and content mesh, as in The Far Side of the Moon (2000), the result is theatrical magic. No one has ever doubted the visual wizardry of Robert Lepage.
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