Cult Queen

At First Glance, you can't quite believe that the tawny, long-legged beauty in front of you is the same Anne Carlisle who portrays both Margaret and Jimmy in the freaky, phenomenal Liquid Sky. The real-life Carlisle has a Park Avenue air and totes a chic outsized carry-all, looking more like a Ford model than like a far-out underground superstar. Anne, it turns out, fits both descriptions. She's a cultural chameleon with 1001 ideas about identity, happy to be registered at Ford, even happier about her current celebrity as a punky New Wave Manhattan model whose sexual partners are zapped into the cosmos the instant they reach orgasm. "People are disappointed sometimes, especially kids in the street," she says. "They've seen Liquid Sky, then they see me and can't believe I'm not Margaret, even though I look very different from that."

Anne in person is a bona fide Connecticut Yankee, born and bred in exurbia, according to some thumbnail biographers, to respectable Republican parents. An OK description, according to Anne herself, "if you want to be really simplistic about it." Her folks now live in Florida. Carlisle père works for the country, her mother's in college administration and they're both evidently crazy about Liquid Sky. "They have video parties (text concluded on page 182)Cult Queen(continued from page 80) and show it to their friends. Which I never expected, believe me. I don't think my mother understood for years what I was doing. You grow up with this image of your parents, then discover how wrong you were. I expected to be an outcast, but I wasn't. Despite a lot of stuff in it she didn't like, my mother's reaction was that it's a very artistic movie, teaching people something, and everyone should see it."

Mrs. Carlisle's view was shared by a slew of critics who have hailed Liquid Sky as "visually bright and arresting" (The New York Times) or "dazzling, funny, shocking and disturbing" (San Francisco Chronicle) and, to top them all, "the funniest, craziest, dirtiest, most perversely beautiful science-fiction movie ever made" (New York magazine). Young audiences have flocked to see for themselves, breaking box-office records at theaters in New York, Chicago, Boston, New Orleans and Philadelphia, and it's still going strong. While not everyone comes away enchanted, there's general agreement that Anne Carlisle is the new queen of the Cs--a cult-film sensation who's also co-author of Sky's screenplay (with Nina T. Kerova and producer-director Slava Tsukerman, a 45-year-old Soviet émigré).

How does a nice girl from Connecticut get caught up in such shenanigans? Simple, reports Anne. "Slava came to me and said, 'Let's write a script about a New Wave model who gets visited by an alien from outer space,' and that's where we started. I wrote a great deal of the screenplay. It wasn't just a question of helping with dialog, though Russian sentence structure isn't quite the same as ours."

Carlisle's own sexual, psychological and professional evolution has not been simple at all. Around the age of puberty, she moved with her family to Florida, took up painting and teenaged rebellion and finally left for New York to study at The School of Visual Arts. While there, making video pieces as exercises, she met an acting instructor named Bob Brady. She wound up as his assistant, but she also decided she'd been miscast for the roles she was playing in real life. "I had this long curly hair and wore wool, you know? Preppie skirts and blazers, like a girl going to art school. And because of the image I presented, I got hit on a lot. You don't have to do much to invite that, of course, in New York. But I found myself embodying a lot of feminine gestures, putting myself in the position of wanting to please, being a victim.

"I didn't know how to handle all that, so I cut off all my hair and started noticing other women in the New Wave doing the same thing." Ask her to define New Wave and Anne will tell you that one of the essentials is change. "The idea is that change is healthy. Experimenting with your looks is one reaction to society's categorization of genders."

During one experimental period of her life, several years ago, Anne wanted to see what it was like to become a person of no particular sex. "I got a job as a bike messenger, working with guys, and tried very hard not to let them fix my bike for me when it was broken. I wasn't trying to be one of the boys; I was just not being one thing or another."

There's little chance of mistaking her for a fella when you see her perched on a twin bed in a Manhattan hotel suite, projecting on the wall slides of the photographs she's just done for Playboy. The pictures set her to reminiscing about the days when her hair was a veritable rainbow of social trends. "I was with a New Wave modeling agency called LaRocka. Very much a nighttime thing; we did shows in the clubs. I had purple hair, blue hair, black hair with a red crest. There was a period of very intense club life, living high, which got to be a little much. But when it became clear that this was self-destructive--and it took quite a bit to force me to admit it--I started making a little Super-8 film, very surreal and poetic."

She addresses every subject head on, including skeptical questions about the relative merits of Liquid Sky. The film may look like pure camp to some people, Carlisle allows, though she herself pitches camp, aesthetically, on rather high ground. "Mostly, I think the movie was a brave thing to do. I'm proud of it. Because it's so complex, working on many different levels at once, it's sometimes difficult for people to get ... you can see Liquid Sky over and over again and read it differently every time, as a comedy or a tragedy or anything you want."

Inevitably, the question arises: Does the real Anne Carlisle view her roles as autobiographical? "I used a great deal of my own past in certain situations as Margaret, but she's not me. I went to see the movie again recently, in fact, and got very angry at her. Margaret is a victim, and since I'd had a lot to do with writing the character, I guess I felt a little angry with myself for having created yet another victim.

"Jimmy also comes from me. I was a tomboy when I was young, like most girls. But playing Jimmy, getting into his own inner monolog as a male, was a great experience. I sensed the kind of pressures men are under, which I don't think women usually understand. On the set, I found that people related to me differently when I was Jimmy. I absolutely believed I was a man, so then people started to treat me differently. It was just great, a power trip. And I loved being powerful, though it was frightening, too. Jimmy's such a negative character that I found myself saying insulting things to women, and they'd just giggle and look up at me adoringly....

"No question, the movie is about sex, even though the title's a reference to drugs. I think it was in India, in the 14th Century, when opium was widely used by royalty and everyone, that liquid sky was an elegant literary term for it. But sex also is like a drug--a dangerous drug when it's offered in trade for something--and women are brought up to think that way. So Liquid Sky really concerns sex roles and how they have been destructive to the relationship between men and women."

By the time she'd finished Liquid Sky, Anne found herself so steeped in those heady omnisexual creative juices that she couldn't turn Margaret and Jimmy off. Nowadays, she can leave the fantasy to audiences and focus on more practical matters. "Having a successful film has made all the difference for me. I signed with the William Morris agency, which gives me contacts and access to people I couldn't meet before. I was always outside the industry, and now I'm inside." And the jaunty tilt of her chin emphasizes that inside is a far cozier place to be.

While other offers ferment, she already has a second feature film in the can: a suspense drama called Blind Alley, directed by Larry Cohen. "Larry approached me after seeing Liquid Sky, but Blind Alley is a totally different kind of movie. I play a young mother. She's a feminist who lives in New York and works in a thrift store, repairing clothes, but her main thing is being a mother." In this film, her sexual identity is less critical than the fact that the woman's child has witnessed a murder, and the young lover she has picked up on the street turns out to be ... well, I mustn't give too much away.

In any case, Anne of the once-purple coiffures is likely to keep reappearing as a screen presence in a career spiced with infinite variety. "I still have some wild clothes in my closet and know I can put them on again if I want to. I'd rather not define my image, because people should change with the culture. You have to be in touch with what's going on, and that's not simply being 'hip' or 'with it.' I want to be free to play many kinds of people. That's what being an actress means, right?"

Unless I'm wrong, sooner or later this fair lady/fey laddie from the New Wave will make it in mainstream moviedom, confirming Carlisle as Liquid Sky's ultimate cultural fallout.

"'I absolutely believed I was a man, so then people started to treat me differently.'"