By Ray Pride Todd Haynes' "Safe" remains one of the decade's masterpieces - serene, mysterious, unyielding. "Velvet Goldmine" is just as smart, just as rewarding to the attentive viewer, yet its surfaces are far more alluring. A riff on the personalities of the 1970s glam rock era, "Goldmine" is freakishly busy in its dynamic welter of pop history, and its affair between two characters, Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor) and Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), who have their likenesses to real-life figures such as Iggy Pop, Lou Reed and David Bowie. Haynes (photo, with Rhys-Meyers) describes his uncommonly accomplished $8 million film as "an act of thievery, which glam rock is as well." There is a Wildean verbal wit throughout, and Haynes, who opens the film with a vignette of Wilde as a child, admits to using Wilde's style of observation throughout. "A lot of them are direct lifts. What I did was retrace the steps by which these ideas were put together by Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno, David Bowie at the time. I took it a step further after reading the amazing and strange intersections of Oscar Wilde's life in the [Richard] Ellman biography [of Wilde] and David Bowie's life and how they each constructed themselves from the outside in, adopted the pose before the work." As with "Safe," Haynes is suspicious of traditional notions of psychological depth. "The sense of depth as we know it in film is completely constructed, even at a visual level. 'Velvet Goldmine' is in some ways like an opera or a musical in that the story is not complex. We've seen it before, it's almost mythic or gestural. The emotion is really more found in the music and the spectacle. That's how you have an emotional connection to musicals you see - it's not in story or complexity of character or in the gritty realism of the scene." "Velvet Goldmine" is equally striking for how the story unfolds in the mind afterwards, once the barrage of imagery has ceased, much as it does when the characters become absences in each others' memories. "I always knew the emotional connection would be about how the main character touched the lives of others and moved on and how they struggled with the aftermath," Haynes says. "He doesn't really become a character until he's gone."

-----------------------------7d43a932801b6 Content-Disposition: form-data; name="userfile"; filename="C:\Documents and Settings\God Zilla\My Documents\VG Files\Venus\articles\nytimes.html" Content-Type: text/html 'Velvet Goldmine': Mixing Glam and Glamor in a Wild, Wildean Spirit

Todd Haynes' dazzlingly surreal "Velvet Goldmine" offers a celestial "Here's looking at you, kid" to the heyday of British glitter rock in general and to the David Bowie of the early 1970s in particular. Without addressing Bowie directly, it appropriates his shimmering, protean aura in virtuoso ways that put ordinary period filmmaking or time-capsule musicology to shame. The astounding Haynes, whose last film ("Safe") took place on an entirely different planet from this one, brilliantly re-imagines the glam-rock '70s as a brave new world of electrifying theatricality and sexual possibility, to the point where identifying precise figures in this neo-psychedelic landscape is almost beside the point. "Velvet Goldmine" tells a story the way operas do: blazing with exquisite yet abstract passions, and with quite a lot to look at on the side. Structured as a rock "Citizen Kane" with an extraterrestrial Rosebud, "Velvet Goldmine" traces its tendrils back to Oscar Wilde, whom it imagines as a schoolboy. ("I want to be a pop idol," this child sweetly announces.) A century later, the Wildean spirit of flamboyance is spectacularly reborn, ready to erupt into the glittery, pansexual pop utopia over which Bowie so dramatically presided. The film doesn't force its musical references on audiences, but it evokes them with vast fondness and fascination. "People have certain memories that they hold very dear, so you want to remain true to them," Christine Vachon, the film's audacious producer, has explained. Out of the wild Ken Russellish phantasmagoria of "Velvet Goldmine" several essential characters emerge, central among them the Bowiesque Brian Slade. Played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers as a stunningly pretty, insolent, snake-hipped presence, he embodies the provocative and mysterious heart of the film. Haynes, cerebral as ever despite this film's explosion of visual sensuality, surrounds Slade with implicit questions about art and inspiration, truth and honesty, passion and repression. Playing what he has rightly called "a birthday present of a part," Ewan McGregor makes a fabulously charismatic rock star named Curt Wild, who is both reproach and object of fascination for Brian Slade. Whatever else he may be, McGregor's often hilariously decadent Curt Wild is the real thing. With typically wicked wit, the film mentions that Curt underwent early shock treatments "to fry the fairy clean out of him" and that the net effect of this was "to make him bonkers every time he heard an electric guitar." In a film that has at least one more major character than it needs, and that like "Safe" overworks its elusiveness in ways sure to confound some audiences, Christian Bale plays the journalist a la "Kane" who investigates Brian Slade from the chilly distance of 1984. That period is rendered no less fancifully than the film's rainbow days, as Bale's doleful Arthur Stuart reaches out from his dreary present to a past that both entices and humiliates him. Arthur, the fan who is forever linked to Curt Wild, conveys all the wistful distance of what it means to see the events here from the outside, looking in.