Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

A Masterpiece!

A Disappointing Continuation

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

This is one of the most underrated films ever. Some call it distracting and full of nonsense, but to me the film is beautifully telling that everything is intertwined - love and hatred, pleasure and pain, life and death. It shows there's always another side to things just like a messed-up Brit who actually is a guardian angel guiding the girl's lost soul all the way. I was only a kid when the film came out back in 1987, but it shook me with a huge magnitude and still does. When there's a light, there's also a shadow. My mind always circle back to this great piece of work at every phase of my life.

Ellen Barkin plays an American sky-diver in Spain who has apparently crash-landed, awakening bruised and disheveled and with memory loss; her attempts to get back to civilization are thwarted by a myriad of oddballs who paw at her like demons from Hell. What might have been an interesting, artistic treatise on purgatory has ended up stagnant and confounding in director Mary Lambert's hands. Perhaps with someone like David Lynch at the helm, "Siesta" may have drawn the viewer in not just with imagery but some haunting subtext as well. Lambert is only interested in externals--and, as a result, her film is portentous and shallow. Lots of talented people litter the cast, but only a handful of scenes (Barkin walking the high-wire above a crowd, her run-in with a deranged cabbie, and the well-staged finale) are astute or memorable. * from ****

Claire "On a Dare" wakes up by an airport runway wearing a red dress. She's dirty and bruised. She has no idea where she is or how she got there, or even what day it is, but she does remember who she is and retains most of her memories. She strips off her dress by a creek to wash off it and herself what seems to be blood, and sunbathes nude to dry off - sustained full-frontal nudity within the first two minutes of the movie, jeepers!I'm reminded of a line from the novel The Screaming Mimi by Frederic Brown, "There's murder before the story proper starts, and murder after it ends; the actual story begins with a naked woman and ends with one, which is a good opening and a good ending, but everything between isn't nice."Claire, finding the blood washes off her thinks someone else must be dead. Discovering and remembering that she is in Spain, she thinks she may have killed her ex-lover Augustine, or his new wife.Claire had been due to skydive without a parachute into a dormant (or artificial?) volcano covered with a net to catch her, that will be on fire. If she misses the net, or hits it after it has burned too much, she's dead in Death Valley. Receiving a letter from her ex-lover who doesn't want her to do the stunt, she flies to Spain to try to get him to return to her, despite her having been married to her promoter for six years or so.Claire has some strange adventures, sometimes pretty horrible. A fat taxi driver with tin dentures offers to help, but his price is sex, or rape. An eccentric brawling artist tries to help her, and doesn't seem to have any motive other than "the good you give out is returned to you."Sprinkled throughout are shots of Claire skydiving; like Roger Ebert, I couldn't tell if this was "fantasy [...] memory, or anticipation" not that it makes much difference. Throughout "falling" gets mentioned a lot in other ways. Claire, in a Catholic church says she feels like she is falling, the artist talks about how the only kind of falling that isn't failing is falling in love, etc.One thing the title seems to refer to is a siesta Claire's ex-lover takes in a small building near a church, where they perhaps used to have sex.Bruce Joel Rubin wrote a screenplay in the 1970s that was considered one of the best unproduceable scripts. This movie seems in a way an attempt to make it, though it is based on a novel. This movie didn't really do it for me, and perhaps time would be better spent reading the novel. Rubin's screenplay was produced a few years after this movie, and turned out quite well.

Mary Lambert's "Siesta" offers plenty of wonderful visuals and a nice amount of sensual atmosphere.A woman in a red dress lies in an airport field,supposedly dead.She wakes.There's blood on her dress,but it doesn't seem to be hers.She can't remember the last few days.As time goes on,the pieces come back to her,and she meets up with some pretty weird people.The plot of "Siesta" is quite confusing and the climax is unpredictable.The acting is alright with Ellen Barkin's excellent performance to boost.Barkin has also some amazing nude scenes,so I wasn't disappointed.Give this one a look.A perfect film to analyze,if you have enough time to waste!