Finishing Heaven is actually an outrageously witty farce willingly collaborated on by everyone involved to one degree or another. The schtick of the cast and crew is carried over into their interviews off screen. Finishing Heaven's key point is the ease with which we are deceived by media of all kinds. It also points to our tendency to overcomplicate autobiography and oversimplify biography in the desperate attempt to reduce human experience to something easily graspable. Rather than investigate the nature of experience, we lower the bar of our ability to richly perceive the world by becoming simpletons. How often do you deceive yourself by believing media representations of people, places and things? For example, Feinberg, a co-star of Finishing Heaven, is actually a noted filmmaker and photographer who for the last thirty-six years has been one of the foremost documentary artists of the tropicalism movement in Brazil. At the age of 16 he took up occupany with the Living Theatre in Paris, made his first film of a bullfight in Paris and then returned to NY at the age of 18 to finish high school and attend film school at NYU. On and off screen, I found Feinberg to have a compelling crazy wisdom that provokes people and either jolts them out of or further into a dizzying myopia of self-referencing blindness.

See Heaven Wants Out by director Robert Feinberg. It is a comedic blast that strips self-involvement naked through making it revoltingly obvious.

Imagine a designer baby cloned from the genes of the Marx Brothers and Fellini. Mix this collision of DNA with that of the Warhol crowd and The Factory. The resultant newborn baby is the body, voice and mind of director Robert Feinberg in Heaven Wants Out.

Feinberg shows a crystalline vision of human experience and feature filmmaking as nothing but a regurgitation of the individual points of view of everyone involved in the process. Heaven Wants Out was his early career declaration that he did not want to spend his own life like this. If you see Heaven Wants Out, you will also want to see the documentary farce about its making entitled Finishing Heaven which was completed this year and directed by Mark Mann and the Shapiros.

Heaven Wants Out was shot in the very early ‘70s when Feinberg was a boy wonder being mentored by Marty Scorsese at NYU’s film school. Scorsese was an early producer of the film. Few film students have the directorial command to draw top talent into their work. However, Feinberg was able to convince Andy Warhol’s top Factory talent Ondine, Holly Woodlawn, Mary Waronow, Murray Moston, Francesco Scavullo, Viva, Tinkerbell and Robert Jacoby to act in his film. Since he made Heaven Wants Out, Feinberg has gained notoriety in Brazil as one of the foremost documentary filmmakers and photographers of the movement called ‘tropicalism’ which has spawned such diverse works as samba, Black Orpheus and The Girl from Ipanema. The last two were written by Feinberg’s father-in-law Vinicius de Moraes who was Brazil's Oxford educated poet laureate and ambassador to France.

The wild, wooly and improbable scenes of Heaven Wants Out are mostly shot in NY interiors. The buildings themselves remain faceless. One departure from this monotony are exterior and interior shots of a bright red and white 1970 Cadillac that is being driven by a talent agent who is a well-costumed but lackluster pimp. The exterior world merely passes by. The collapse into interiority and self-focus is the sole pursuit of the pretty but slightly terrifying people who occupy the frames of Heaven Wants Out. Each character is in the solitary confinement of their points of view. This lockdown in self-identity precludes empathy, sympathy or intimacy.

The lead character Heaven, played by Ruby Lynn Reyner (La Mama, Theatre of the Ridiculous) epitomizes a strange combination of beauty, opportunism and an abyss of obsessive self-centeredness. The film depicts her attempts to escape from her life as a cabaret singer in a seamy nightclub. The club has a bill of aged or physically challenged entertainers who never had even a glimmer of hope of reaching the big time.
It is clear from the beginning that Heaven wants out of this place yet she has chosen to be there. It is so obvious that she will never make it out that I wanted to jump up on the screen and yank her out of her self-imposed victimhood and into reality. At the same time this is impossible, so the audience is left wondering if she will be able to find her exit out of the bleak relationships with the men she chooses.

Her suitors include Vinny the jukebox king, played by Murray Moston (Taxi Driver, Mean Streets) who is an entirely unlikeable batterer and greaseball. His townhouse in NY is decorated in early Las Vegas. Another of Heaven’s men is former husband Dr. Bennett Member, played by Ondine (Couch, Dynamite Chicken), who is a bourbon-swilling, chain-smoking gynecologist specializing in treating transvestites. Last, but not least, is Philip, played by Roger Jacoby (How To Be a Homosexual, Futurist Song) who is Heaven’s married dreamboat. When his wife dies, he romantically pursues Heaven in a seduction scene consisting of an agonizingly long-winded card game in his soulless apartment. The engagement ring scene is not to be missed.

Heaven is engaged in a sick cycle of competition with other women for the physical and economic attention of men. Even though the stunningly gorgeous Mary Woronow (Chelsea Girls and Eating Raoul) who plays Kitty is too involved in her own lunacy to bother with such competition, Heaven nevertheless sadistically demeans her in an attempt to lessen her own anxiety which is grounded in her constitutional right to be a victim. Ondine also plays Mrs. Poole who has served time in the same loony bin as Kitty. On the outskirts of a depressingly amateur water ballet in the pool of a Southampton estate, Kitty and Mrs. Poole crazily chase each other through a maze of well-pruned landscaping, each never finding the other. Feinberg manages to resurrect the entirety of this dismal display with the unique satiric wit that dapples every frame of the film.

Heaven Wants Out shows that in the meaninglessness of a life based on self nothing ever happens. Through the films use of pretty but absurd pictures and provoking but barely penetrable dialog, life is laid bare as an existential dilemma with no exit from points of view. It is amazing that the film and its script came from the mind of a 22-year old.

To sum it all up, Robert Feinberg is a person everyone should know on and off screen. You'll really see what you're made of when you meet him. His skill at screen direction is just as alive no matter the medium. Everything you take yourself to be should be in stark contrast in the light of his comedic insight and wisdom; that is, unless you are so wrapped up in yourself that you do not see the key point of his wrathful compassion.