Mr. Fatima

A sun-bleached California boardwalk becomes the stage for a delirious masquerade: Eddie, pockets as empty as the horizon, slips into the sequined skin of an Oriental danseuse, then into the silk cape of a vampire, then into whatever carnivalesque guise will coax nickels from the delighted mob. Each dusk he paints his face with kohl and desperation, shimmying for tourists who will never know the exile pulsing beneath the glitter. Beside him, a fellow castaway—equally heartsick, equally penniless—learns to rattle finger-cymbals and flash fangs, a two-man repertory of illusion. Their nightly haul is measured not in dollars but in degrees of separation from the girl Eddie left behind, the one whose father slammed the door on his last plea for train fare. Every coin clinks like a mile of track, every clap from the crowd a small engine dragging him closer to the sweetheart who may already have faded into someone else’s photograph. Between the neon hiss of the amusement pier and the salt-stung darkness under the pier, the film pirouettes on the razor edge between burlesque and bereavement, finding in the shimmy of Eddie’s hips a threnody for every drifter whose address is the surf.