Repo Chick

GRITTY IN PINK Jonet stands at the center of a dystopian L.A.

Punk-era bad boy Alex Cox (Repo Man, Sid and Nancy) has been toiling in microbudgeted camp and self-referentiality for years now, and this crass, crazy, impish farce—which finally received a brief, long-delayed theatrical release in New York last month—is equal parts retro ’tude, Californicated satire and playroom goof. I mean that last literally: Cox uses toys and model railroads for his sets, shooting his motley cast (including Rosanna Arquette, Karen Black, Xander Berkeley and Miguel Sandoval) against green screens and then dropping them into a tabletop caricature of L.A., post–apocalyptic recession.

Riffing on nasty Valley Girl clichés, Jaclyn Jonet is the titular heroine, a spoiled aristo-narcissist who must get a repo job to justify her inheritance and who, in the process, gets mixed up with a terrorist plot like none other. Cox is recycling here—from Repo Man (unrelated plotwise) to his aborted version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—but with his customary élan. In spirit not unlike pop avant-gardist Craig Baldwin’s films (Tribulation 99, Spectres of the Spectrum), Repo Chick also comes off as Southland Tales redone in miniature but more coherently, with room for a Nam June Paik robot made of TVs and hot stabs at the rich and famous on behalf of foreclosed “mortgage abusers.” Alas, it could also be a whole lot funnier.

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