Compared to other Russell movies, Savage Messiah is actually rather restrained, although like them it gets involved in role playing, theatrical behavior, comedy, madness, and the transcending of everyday life. As Tchaikovsky does in The Music Lovers, Gaudier equates life and art. Like Tchaikovsky's women or Sister Jeanne in The Devils, Sophie lives in an ethereal realm of fantasy harshly at odds with the surrounding material world—in this case, a world of starving artist's poverty that requires her to grub for half-rotten vegetables or menial jobs and to hole up in a hovel that roars with the din of trains and traffic overhead. But here things change. Insanity, self-destruction, death menace or annihilate people in the other films; even the ragged troupers of The Boy Friend … are almost macabre in their blindness to their own incompetence. None of these threats disappears from Savage Messiah, but the pattern...