Chameleon Street, 1989
Loosely based on a true story, William Street (Wendell B Harris Jr) is tired of working for his father’s security company, listening to his wife’s complaining, and in general being trapped at the lower end of the rat race. Street decides to become a professional, just without all that pesky schooling. Faking it until he makes it, Street impersonates a reporter, a lawyer, and even a doctor at a hospital, spinning stories as he tries to stay one step ahead of the truth.
Anchored in a unique cinematic voice and an underdog story that is in a constant state of attraction and repulsion, this is a must-see.
I’m not sure I can think of another film I’ve seen recently where I found a main character so appealing and yet also really disgusting. As portrayed by an uncredited Harris (who also wrote and directed), Street’s every utterance is layered with intelligence and contempt. And perhaps most endearing---in a totally sociopathic way---that contempt remains even when Street is totally out of his depth.
As with so many grifters and conmen, one of the greatest tragedies here seems to be that Street could have had any of the careers he fakes if he had pursued them in earnest. When it’s necessary for pretending to be a doctor, he buckles down and studies hard. But it isn’t the careers themselves that Street seems to be chasing, so much as the respect and status that come with them. There’s something of an extra heft given that Street is Black, at times sitting amongst men who would consider him an imposter/outsider even if his credentials were real.
Honestly, I found this film completely captivating. Despite knowing that Street’s behavior was illegal and immoral, some part of me was charmed by him and wanted him to succeed. Yes, that wears off quite a bit when Street performs surgery on a woman, noting that her stretch marks “gross him out”, and his charm has worn pretty thin around the time he pretends to cut his daughter’s throat with a knife. But Harris really manages to create a character who is loathsome yet captivating.
The direction itself at first seems a bit too normal for the very strange main character and story, although at times, that only served to highlight how weird it all was. Street’s poetic inner monologue at times clashes hilariously with what is happening on screen. I think that for me, this contrast actually captured conceptually this man’s sociopathy: from the outside it looks normal, while on the inside all manner of unspeakable things are happening.
All of this exists in a wonderful mish-mash of social/cultural references. In one of his first escapades, Street attempts to blackmail the wife of a famous baseball player. Later in the film, he and a partner show up to a party dressed in absolutely stunning renditions of the main characters from Cocteau’s
Beauty and the Beast.
One part of the film I’m still mulling over is the way that it dips into moments of homophobia and a lot of misogyny. The film is so embedded in Street’s point of view, that I genuinely have a hard time separating out if the film thinks women are money-hungry monsters who drive men to extremes, or if that’s just Street’s point of view on the women in his life. My sense was that it was more the latter, but that doesn’t necessarily negate the way that those characters come off.
Many reviews mention the baffling fact that this film won the Grand Prize and Sundance and then wasn’t picked up by a single distributor. After watching I immediately went to Harris’s IMDb page, and was very dismayed to see that this remains his only directing credit.
Definitely worth checking out.
Reply to Topic
