A very personal film in which the director was also responsible for the scenario, art direction and the camera-work. Her sister played the lead and together they edited the film. This approach had also been adopted by the Menkes sisters in earlier films. Nina: ‘Doing all these functions is an active choice because my work is intensely personal. I would never have anyone else shoot my movies or be the art director’.In Queen of Diamonds, a ‘film without heroes’, a woman without a past or future is followed in an almost-documentary fashion in her motel room, at work and during the ritual care of a dying old man. Her husband had recently disappeared without trace, but that only seems to be an unimportant side issue in the story. The title Queen of Diamonds refers to the woman’s work: in a casino.The lengthy and tightly-framed shots with apparently few spectacular actions (by a woman) make Menkes’ style reminiscent of the early work of Chantal Akerman. She also shares with Akerman a perfect feeling for tension and for the hypnotic effect of time.Nina Menkes herself sees the film as a portrait of contemporary American culture in which the excessive zeal to acquire material wealth is coupled with an emotional deaf-mutism and alienation.The film was given the ironic subtitle ‘a western without horses’. It has nothing to do with a western, but the desolate, hot and dusty landscape round Las Vegas plays an important role.
