Troy and Tan-Yah are two desperate people. Their insatiable hunger for success and sensation puts them deeper and deeper into a spiral of detachment of body and soul.Desperate, they try out one pose after another and in doing so deny completely their identity. The despairing wanderings of the two culminate in their ‘success’ during several satanic and sado-masochistic rituals. They acquire brief fame (the 15 minutes according to the Warhol philosophy) after they kill their diabolical course leader and can be fleetingly famous criminals.Desperate is a black comedy in which the two are followed for a period of fifteen years. With great feeling for kitsch Rico Martinez dramatises a ‘half-pathetic cult life’. We follow Troy and Tan-Yah during their mental, social and financial demise, and see how they live it up in a chameleon -like way in all kinds of faddish and fashionable trends which Martinez himself describes as: ‘Disco, pyramid scams, punk rock and heavy metal, collagen injections, lipo-suction, steroids, method acting, lipsync-ing and celebrity weight training.’Apart form classic examples such as Faust, Martinez says he is primarily influenced by television programmes: ‘The Valley of the Dolls from the ’60s, and America’s Most Wanted from the ’80s’. Or as Bérénice Reynaud (Libération) formulated it: ‘Desperate uses only the most vulgar of television language’. According to David D. Kim (Village Voice) Desperate has a fairly straightforward story for an experimental film, ‘that nonetheless strikes all the right campy notes’. The film-maker finally explains his work with the following words: ‘I’m definitely into the subversive aspect of experimental film-making but bored by its obsession with non-conformity’.
