Rick

Everything of value is vulnerable, the Dutch poet Lucebert once wrote, and the feature début of Curtiss Clayton -for years the editor for Gus Van Sant -is a perfect illustration of this. Rick O’Lette (Bill Pullman) is a hard, merciless executive in the marketing business. The Image Company, the company he works for, has a large office in the financial district of New York -beautifully portrayed as an area without any human life where managers drift round in their limousines and earn their money obsessively. The owner of The Image Company is the young Duke (Aaron Stanford), who treats his human resources in an even more immoral and indifferent way. While Rick twice humiliates a bewildered applicant of Asian origin, Duke does not shirk from humiliating Rick either. From behind his enormous desk, he spends most of his time visiting porn chat sites. The only mature concepts that get through to these adolescent men are money and power. But Rick O’Lette’s name does not sound like Verdi’s Rigoletto entirely without reason. Without his colleagues knowing, he has a different life as a widower and father of a teenage daughter Eve back home. When Eve threatens to come into contact with Duke, years of cynicism clash with paternal love, the last refuge of his humanity.