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Back Against the Wall
A black-and-white triptych of personal destruction following a stripper June as she drifts in and out of the lives of three shadowy men. The first is Levey, an intellectually gifted burnout living in a motel, reading books and playing chess. His night terrors, blackouts, paranoia, rage and the sexual advances from his creepy friend Ed force June to leave. She ends up with Vince a low-level gangster connected to strip clubs and involved in the adult entertainment industry. His lifestyle of sex, violence and drugs takes its toll and leads June into the final segment – a return to find Levey, but instead ending up in the grotesque and horrifying world of a dying Ed.
2000, 16mm, b/w, 94 min, sound mono
"Psychotic is the only word that does it justice."
- Amy Taubin, The Village Voice
“…Fotopoulos’ strangest and most confrontational … It’s the first of his features to display an assured gift for humor, and the final scene manages to be simultaneously apocalyptic, oddly poignant, and bluntly anticlimactic”
– Travis Crawford, Filmmaker Magazine
“…Conjures a Lynch-like vision of the rotting underbelly of Middle America”
– Stephen Holden, New York Times
"Formally inventive and resolutely modern: strong on interiors and text, distinctively scored, but easy-on-the-viewer Mamet it ain't. Very early Cronenberg, without the genre trappings, comes to mind as an atmospheric cousin, but it's got its own unsettling if also alienating tone."
- Time Out London
"Here is a filmmaker clearly in control of an assured, original style."
- Film Comment
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