Writer-director Thomas Mignone’s Queen of Manhattan is not a simple biopic; it’s a dream of neon, trauma, and survival that uses the life of adult film star Vanessa Del Rio told against 1970s and 80s New York City. Much like Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz, it turns biography into a surreal experience. Where Fosse turned his alter ego into a choreographed mortality play with Jessica Lange as the angelic image of death, Mignone places Vanessa (Vivian Lamolli) before a ghost figure of her own: a woman who embodies both the industry’s seductions, addictions, and inevitable violence. What results is part hallucination with a Mexican wrestler figure occurring, and a mixture of extrapolated facts that are mentioned in the opening credits
Mignone’s style is based on contradictions. It is theatrical yet raw, but never sanitized. Yet the director resists the clichés of porn’s excess. Instead, the picture shows the bruised purples and yellows, echoing the warped sense of what Times Square’s peep booths and marquees were. In these cramped spaces, Vanessa Del Rio’s myth begins to take shape not as pornography, but as a performance art based on survival.
“…the life of adult film star Vanessa Del Rio…”
Queen of Manhattan unfolds in vignettes rather than conventional chronology. Each chapter marked by music, cigarette smoke, or the flash of a camera bulb becomes another layer of self-definition. We see young Vanessa as a daughter who grows into a hustler, actress, and muse of other women in the business. Between each fragment, ghostly interludes appear: Vanessa confronting a silent standing woman frozen in a pose of being assaulted by two men, and a Masked Mexican wrestler figure who watches silently, both seem to mirror her fate. One sequence, where Vanessa’s reflection is assaulted by her own projected image, merges eroticism and violation with terror.
Vivian Lamolli’s performance as Vanessa Del Rio makes her no saint or martyr, instead a woman doing what she has to do to live, pay rent in an economy built on desire. Lamolli finds a remarkable balance between poise and panic, laughter and exhaustion. Like Roy Scheider’s Joe Gideon, she’s addicted to the show itself, and every close-up feels like an audition for self-forgiveness. When she speaks directly to the camera from behind the glass of her sex booth, the frame becomes a confession booth, the audience both voyeur and judge.
Supporting turns from Drea de Matteo and Taryn Manning as Danny, Vanessa’s doomed female confidante, who she tries to help give the film a sense of being trapped. Manning’s assault scene with a client is handled with restraint, recalling Fosse’s own dance of mortality, except here the choreography is replaced by silence, breath, and aftermath.
"…refuses exploitation and titillation..."
