Fantasyland by Amy Taubin
For Daniel Schmid, love is ultimately the projection onto the other of one's own fantasy. No wonder then that cinema is his medium. One of his most haunting films, La Paloma, is like most Hollywood movies, except that it exposes the fetishism that Hollywood naturalizes. Exposes it only to embrace it more passionately. It's not of "Gone with the Wind". Like Fassbinder and Tennessee Williams, Schmid defines desire as identification and gender as masquerade.
Overflowing with melodramatic emotion and architecture, with flowers and furs, veils and velvets, Schmid's films verge on kitsch, only to be rescued by an ironically modernist intelligence that acknowledges the Freudian construct of the unconscious but refuses its rationalization of desire. For Daniel Schmid that obsession is absurd doesn't lessen its transformative power.
The Village Voice, NYC
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