How many successful young workaholic women are prostitutes in their spare time? I can't imagine very many but that's Kathleen Turner's lifestyle in 1984's Crimes of Passion. Directed by Ken Russell, it's called an "erotic thriller" but it plays more like a watered down John Waters film, concerned more with not especially insightful satire than with thrills. It is erotic, not in the intimate, slow burn way of Body Heat but in the way of a Playboy cartoon.
Bobby (John Laughlin) thinks he's happily married to Amy (Annie Potts), a humourless woman who desultorily rebuffs all his attempts at sexual solicitation or affection (a real waste of Annie Potts). One day, he gets a job following a tenacious career woman called Joanna (Kathleen Turner) to find out what she does at night. Turns out, she moonlights as a prostitute called China Blue.
She has a stalker played by Anthony Perkins who piles shaming, religious rhetoric on her when he's not paying for sex. A lot of the movie feels like a stage play when Perkins and she take turns strutting around each other, delivering monologues about sex and roleplay on lurid sets with lurid lighting. The conflict here is between religious hypocrisy and the potential hollowness of women's sexual liberation. It's all obvious and ham-fisted, the worst being a climax of sorts when Joanna is paid to have sex with a dying man.
Russell rushes through the scene at an odd pace as though he knew the argument he was presenting had no substance but he couldn't be bothered to think of anything else. Like a kid rushing through a book report on the night before it was due.
China Blue has great wallpaper. Turner gives a good performance and sometimes it is fun watching her and Perkins play off each other. Laughlin is a total bore and I was not interested in him being the sexual saviour for Joanna that Russell wanted him to be.
Crimes of Passion is available on The Criterion Channel.
No comments:
Post a Comment