Description
The film is set in a dark surreal New York that is mostly devoid of humans and populated only by rats and a few eccentrics. Lafayette is a young French electrician living on his own in a basement who works for Andreas Flaxman, the cynical owner of a waxwork museum dedicated to recreating scenes from imperial Rome. He works alongside his friend the sculptor Luigi Nocello, who the maintains the varied and often macabre wax displays, such as the Crucifixion of Jesus and the Assassination of Julius Caesar, which fill the museum.
Lafayette also works as a lighting technician for a feminist theatre group. After rehearsal one day, the women in the group discuss their next project and decide to improvise a piece about rape for their next production, contending that women are just as capable of violence as men are; in the middle of their discussion, they knock Lafayette unconscious with a bottle of Coca-Cola, pin him down, and the attractive Angelica volunteers to rape Lafayette.
Beside the Hudson River, amidst construction site of Battery Park City, Lafayette meets Luigi and a band of eccentrics who find an abandoned baby chimpanzee in the palm of a giant King Kong Sculpture that Lafayette adopts. When he brings the chimp with him to the museum, Flaxman warns him that the chimp will rob him his freedom if he does not get rid of it.
Flaxman is approached by the mysterious Paul Jefferson of the State Foundation for Psychological Research who convinces the initially resistant Flaxman to transform the face of the sculpture Julius Caesar into the face of John F. Kennedy.
Angelica, who has become enamored with Lafayette, moves into his sordid flat and shares in the care of the infant chimp. However, when Lafayette does not respond to the news that she is pregnant, she moves out. Alone again, he returns one day to find his baby ape eaten by rats. In total despair and needing human contact, he breaks into the waxwork museum but is met with hostility by the owner. The two fight and a fire, presumably caused by faulty wiring, consumes them both. Later, we see Angelica on the shore playing happily with her child.
