Silver Star

First thing you will notice is the focus on the swirling electric lights at night, similar to the album cover for Heaven or Las Vegas by the Cocteau Twins. Then come sights that are only in America, like civil war reenactments. Next is the truly surreal colors of  Van Dien’s clothes, jewelry, and makeup, with impossibly bright shades popping all over the place like cartel gunfire. There should be a coffee table book of select stills from Silver Star, as cinematographer Cole Graham delivers one perfect composition after another, holding a Dalí-like melting mirror up to life in the USA. It is a landscape of glitter, plastic, and twilight-year facades. Welcome home, partner.

At the surreal core of Silver Star, you will find the fantastically talented Van Dien staring back at you. While Amar and Bessis make sure the storyline background is well built, it is still up to Van Dien to carry the picture. She not only carries it, but she also spins the picture on an upraised index finger, like a Harlem Globetrotter. His first appearance with her pregnant belly swinging around glues the audience to both her and the movie. Van Dien strikes that crucial balance with her non-stop chatter, being an annoyance to Leigh-Anne Johnson but not to the audience. We cannot believe the wild s**t that comes out of her mouth, but we can believe the pitch-perfect timing she is delivering it in. It is a symphonic treatment of vulgarity to be enjoyed by all.

I did come away with a feeling that the horse in the story that was lost should have been looked for a little longer and harder. While I understand Leigh-Anne Johnson being knocked off into just reacting to being pursued, there should have still been some further drive to find the horse. However, we still have a very rich story that comes together in an ultra-respectable way at the end. We also have a romance that keeps beating the door down. Like the excellent American Meltdown, this movie has a friendship between the female protagonists that catches fire, revealing a love story gold. Silver Star is an American nightmare as dreamed of from a French perspective, and it is as sharp as a red-white-and-blue guillotine.