Warning: Very uneven reviews!!!

Impressively stylish but curiously empty..TV Guide..Ken Fox

Gasoline is a thrilling and atmospheric love story, referencing everything from Thelma & Louise, Bound, The Trouble with Harry, and Heavenly Creatures as it road-trips to its explosive conclusion---- The New York Gay and Lesbian Film Festival
======================================================
Los Angeles Times
August 29, 2003

MOVIE REVIEW
Borrowed ideas fuel 'Gasoline'

Women hit the road in Italy after a tragedy in a film that, despite some good attributes, finally owes too much to "Thelma & Louise."

By Kevin Thomas, Times Staff Writer

Once it gets past a pointless jumble of images, Monica Stambrini's lurid "Gasoline" focuses on the torso of a leggy woman, her confident, sexy strut accentuated by spike heels. The camera follows her through an airport and to a gasoline station, a two-hour drive from Naples. The camera doesn't reveal her face, that of a glamorous woman, perhaps 40, until she confronts her daughter standing behind the station's coffee bar.

The mother (Mariella Valentini) loses her cool almost immediately. She has not seen her daughter Lenni (Regina Orioli) in the two years before she dropped out of her university and wound up working at the station, where she has become the lover of Stella (Maya Sansa), the station's attendant and mechanic.

Tall, beautiful Lenni and dark, vibrant Stella are happy and independent. The mother wants to take her daughter with her and has 20 million lire in her handbag as a bribe.

When Lenni resists, her mother accosts her physically, and Stella rushes to Lenni's rescue, punching out the mother, whose head strikes the edge of the coffee bar counter. She falls dead on the floor.

Stambrini sets up this predicament with energy and raw emotion, generating sympathy for the lovers, but runs into trouble when they hit the road, on the run with Tunisia as their purported destiny.

Two nasty guys and a girl have hassled Stella for gas when she tells them the station is closed; she gives in, but it's easy to predict that they will turn up again, primed for an explosion of homophobic violence.

It takes quite a while for Stambrini to generate momentum as her film unfolds, and when it does it becomes clear she is overly indebted to "Thelma & Louise." She sustains psychological and emotional validity in the relationship of the lovers, played selflessly by Sansa and Orioli, who also illuminates Lenni's complicated feelings about her mother, but "Gas" is finally too derivative and sensational for its own sake to work. Early on it even becomes all too easy to predict exactly what will happen at the film's big climactic moment.

'Gasoline'
MPAA rating: Unrated.
Times guidelines: Extreme violence, language, drugs, some sex.

Maya Sansa...Stella
Regina Orioli...Lenni
Mariella Valentini...The Mother

A Strand Releasing presentation. Director Monica Stambrini. Producer Galliano Iuso for Digital Film. Screenplay Stambrini, Elena Stancanelli, AnneRitte Ciccone; based on the novel by Stancanelli. Cinematographer Fabio Cianchetti. Editor Paola Freddi. Music Massimo Zamboni. Costumes Antonella Cannarozzi. Art director Alessandro Rosa. In Italian, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes.

Exclusively at the Fairfax Cinemas, Beverly Blvd. at Fairfax Ave., (323) 655-4010.

=====================================================
Thelma and Louise: Vigilantes with vaginas, all dressed up with no place to go.
By Jim Emerson
The tragi-comic (pseudo-)feminist road movie Thelma and Louise has been hailed as a breakthrough movie, one of those surprise zeitgeist-catching hits that expresses something essential about its time.   But it's really a (fashion) victim of its time. Poor Thelma and Louise should have been made in the 1970s as an unpolished, low-budget production by Robert Altman or Bob Rafelson or someone with a feel for the raw and messy -- but sometimes extraordinary -- possibilities of human life.

But it's too late for that now. It's the '90s, and everyone and everything is viewed as a commodity. And, as if we needed any more evidence of that sad fact, British director Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner, Black Rain) has taken the lower-middle-class feminist rage at the heart of Thelma and Louise and plastic-packaged it as a feature-length perfume commercial targeted at knee-jerk "feminists."

Thelma and Louise fits into the fugitive-couple-on-the-run order of movies such as You Only Live Once, They Live By Night, Bonnie and Clyde, Thieves Like Us and Badlands, to name a few. The difference, of course, is that, here, both parts of the couple are female, on the run in a man's world full of sexist slobs and patronizing patriarchs. But what should have been an exciting, unpredictable journey of self-discovery for these women too often feels like it's been road-mapped in advance, even though there's no clear destination.

Scott undermines the movie's political points by portraying two key male characters as editorial-cartoon idiots. If only things were that simple. Thelma's husband Darryl is just too one-note awful to be believable, pointedly interrupting an urgent phone call from his wife to cheer a football play on television. (Get the point?)

And a truck driver who makes lewd remarks to Thelma and Louise is portrayed as such a grotesquely ridiculous cretin that he fails to represent any serious threat to them. Really, how intimidating can a slobbering, two-dimensional 'toon be? His fate is drained of meaning because he's too freakish to actually stand in for the panting male sexism that he's supposed to represent.

Both these guys are oversized cardboard villains, knocked over with bludgeons rather than skewered with satirical daggers. This is the equivalent of Alan Parker's racist Mississippi Burning, which posits that all racists are easily identifiable by their hideous physical malformations, when in fact racism and sexism are insidious because they manifest themselves in thousands of inconspicuous ways, not because the people who perpetuate them are just plain ugly, inside and out.

In the depiction of four other crucial male characters, however, (Thelma and Louise are virtually the only women in the movie, except for a few waitresses) the movie is more successfully complex. J.D. (Brad Pitt), a sweet-talking, seductive young hitchhiker to whom Thelma takes a shine is the ideal blend of golden boy and con man. Harlan (Timothy Carhart), a good ol' boy pick-up artist who comes on to Thelma at a truck stop saloon, changes from charming to threatening with terrifying suddenness.

Hal (Harvey Keitel) is a kind of guardian angel police officer who empathizes with and feels protective of Thelma and Louise, even as he helps track them down. And Jimmy (Michael Madsen), Louise's noncommittal boyfriend, is a wandering musician who loves her but hasn't the faintest idea of how to express it.

In the end, the movie throws away any kind of humanity for hollow iconography: bleakly beautiful southwestern landscapes, guns, and gorgeous antique cars involved in the same old car chases with herds of police vehicles. How pathetic that Hollywood's idea of "feminist" movie-making is to simply give these gals a gun and a hot car.

This movie should have felt dangerous and unpredictable, not framed and composed like a page out of Vanity Fair.  Too bad so much of the tension and passion is petrified under layers of cinematic nail polish.And while there's some cheap-thrill cathartic value to seeing the gender tables turned, that's not enough to sustain it, even with this terrific cast.

For better or worse, Sarandon and Davis just seem so much smarter and livelier than this patronizing material. Gender-switching a traditional male-oriented genre is an intriguing place to start, but Thelma and Louise only key-scratches the lustrous surface, and then takes a joy ride off into the pre-fab, picture-pretty sunset.

Thelma and Louise
http://www.cinepad.com/reviews/thelma.htm