I Would Like to See It: The Killing of a Chinese Bookie

Few people can do “hapless” like Ben Gazzara, whose features are simultaneously so chiseled and so large that he appears cobbled together from parts in a kit. As dim-witted strip club owner Cosmo Vitelli he has the air of a luckless tertiary Sopranos character given the limelight for a single episode we know from the jump won’t end well for him, and as he racks up gambling debts, reveals the extent of his own personally awkward incompetence, and lavishes money and attention on the bizarre spoken word striptease accompaniment act of in-house performer Mr. Sophistication (Meade Roberts), the sense that what comes next won’t be gentle grows until there’s room for little else in the scope of Cassavetes’ strange and beautiful little film. We are watching a man fail, and even worse, he doesn’t understand — or refuses to understand — that  he’s failing.

Cassavetes shoots The Killing of a Chinese Bookie as a kind of arthouse noir, swirls of cadmium smoke hanging lazily in deep red lighting, shadows shading to a deep, velvety blackness that seems almost to be eating its way into the frame from the edges. His interiors are labyrinthine, from the plywood tunnels and alcoves under Cosmo’s club to the bare steel beams and supports of an unfinished building adjacent to an empty parking garage. It’s an aesthetic choice which underscores Cosmo’s manipulable, weak-willed nature, the infirmity of his grasp on the link between actions and consequences. During his almost preternaturally lucky hit on importer and Triad boss Benny Wu (Soto Joe Hugh), a man he believes to be simply the titular Chinese bookie, we see how easily his frightened incompetence spills into violence. Our pity at his helplessness is complicated even as he reaches his most vulnerable point.

For the film’s last forty minutes, Cosmo walks around with a bullet in his side. Again and again he tries to find footing for his continued existence, trying to reconnect with his lover Rachel (Azizi Johari) and her mother Betty (Virginia Carrington), trying to inspire his dancers to delve deep inside themselves to embody the dream of his club’s pitifully artsy performances, trying with one last surge of denial-fueled energy to make sense of the contradictions and shortcomings which make up his life. He’s a man who lives inside the physical manifestation of his vision, who considers himself misunderstood because his club patrons come to see skin and don’t appreciate Mr. Sophistication’s thuddingly unfunny patter, and as he races toward the inevitable conclusion that in every way imaginable his reach has exceeded his grasp, he turns his face away and stares into the light of his own dumb, weird, dream. I hope it gave him comfort.