Cairo Station: Working-Class Heroin
The endless lockdown plunged us in the most apathetic and depressing period of our lives in which the only choice to survive was between Netflix or heroin addiction. At Cairo Station we choose heroin. Here are four ways to do it in style..
Absences répétées (Repeated Absences)
Guy Gilles, 1972, France.
Ennui and rejection of bourgeois values are the underlying themes of this forgotten existential drama set in a post-’68 Paris kissed to death by heroin. In the words of Georges Sadoul (and in those of Proust): Guy Gilles’ cinema is like going à la recherche du temps perdu.
El Pico (Overdose)
Eloy De La Iglesia, 1983, Spain.
A cult movie of the Spanish cine quinqui genre, El Pico is a story is a story of addiction with a socio-political edge. Set in the depressing and troubled eighties in Bilbao in between aspirations of independence (from the state, from the parents) and disillusion. Its success led to a sequel the following year: El Pico 2.
Amore Tossico (Toxic Love)
Claudio Caligari, 1983, Italy.
The same year, another cult but a different latitude. The political aspirations of the seventies are long gone and Italy enters into the so-called “riflusso” period. Those on the margins of the rampant gold rush are left with nothing but a despair that goes by the name of heroin. In the same Ostia that took Pasolini (mourned in requiem by the Coil), our beloved youth throw away a future that never existed.
Igla (The Needle)
Rashid Nugmanov, Kazakh USSR, 1988.
Things were no better on the other side of the Iron Curtain. But here the addictions are twofold: morphine and Soviet television. Interpreted by the legendary Viktor Tsoi (leader of the band Kino, whose life is depicted in 2018 movie Leto) The Needle is a potpourri of Soviet oddities. With this (over)dosed mix of stylish noir, experimental feature and lone hero tale, social realism is coming to an end and the only possible watchword is: Perestroika.
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