Title: EXPOSED ¥ Pers: KINSKI, NASTASSJA / McSHANE, IAN ¥ Year: 1983 ¥ Dir: TOBACK, JAMES ¥ Ref: EXP005AA ¥ Credit: [ UNITED ARTISTS / THE KOBAL COLLECTION ]
Courtesy Film Society of Lincoln Center
This wild ride, directed by James Toback, stars Nastassja Kinski as Elizabeth Carlson, an unhappy college student who flees to New York and becomes a famous model. But her rise is tinged with cloak-and-dagger tension, starting with the opening sequence of a bomb attack in Paris, and the resulting thriller is also an exemplary tale of leveraging celebrity into politics. Harassed and abused by a professor (played by Toback), Elizabeth drops out of school and makes her way to New York (Toback savors the mean streets). Working as a waitress, she's spotted by a photographer, and her life changes—and then changes again when she's stalked by a concert violinist (Rudolf Nureyev) with a sideline in terrorist-hunting, for which he recruits her. Toback skips the details of Elizabeth's success in favor of the high-stakes maneuvers in its shadows, and, back in Paris, the director unfolds a breathtaking bag of tricks as the violence ratchets up. Tensely pendular tracking shots and deft full-circle pans mesh split-second action with a repressed romanticism; after a tautly efficient car chase, the inevitable conflagration yields a majestic, paranoid stillness. Released in 1983.
— Richard Brody