THE LAST SEDUCTION
A film review by Phil Herring
Copyright 1994 Phil Herring
Written by Steve Barancik Directed by John Dahl Actors: Linda Fiorentino, Bill Pullman, Peter Berg
Late last year I saw a quirky, stylish film called RED ROCK WEST by the then little-known director John Dahl. It had some of the elements of a road movie (including, I might add somewhat facetiously, Dennis Hopper), but was at its heart a thriller, with shades of film noir (for example, the bad woman who leads a basically good man astray with her womanly wiles). It was solidly paced, with well-written characters and an original plot, and I liked it. In Australia, though, it was released quite some time after it was made, and only saw a limited release in a few art-house cinemas.
So it was with some optimism that I approached THE LAST SEDUCTION. I wasn't disappointed (and neither was the appreciative full house at Sydney's Dendy Cinema, which in general shuns the output from the Hollywood factories in favour of more innovative product). Dahl didn't write this film (script credit goes to Steve Barancik), but it still bears a strong resemblance to his previous work. It's dark, and it features a rather naive young man being led astray by a smarter and less scrupulous woman, who is seeking the removal of a troublesome husband. If you saw RED ROCK WEST, this much will be familiar, especially when you find out that the film is set in a small town. (I might also somewhat cynically add that the main plot difference lies in the woman being the drifter, and the man the local.)
Such resemblances aside, the film is very different in mood and pacing. The action is set in a small town in upstate New York, a town that seem to go out of its way to be boring. The evil woman in this film is Bridget, wife a bent doctor, who robs her husband of a large sum of money gained from a one-off drug deal. She's forced to hide out in the tiny town of Benton, where she meets Mike, a local bored with the small town after trying his luck in the bright lights of Buffalo, N.Y., but back in his hometown after a failed marriage.
Unlike Nicholas Cage's drifter character in the previous film, however, Bridget (played by Linda Fiorentino) is no dummy--she's a hard, manipulating bitch. It's poor Mike (played by Peter Berg) who gets sucked into a relationship that is, from the outset, manipulative. Watching Mike get used and abused by Bridget is the main driving force in the film. It will make you squirm.
Bridget also has all the best lines. Her opportunism and objectivist ethos is so transparent that you just have to laugh at her one-liners, showing as they do the sheer balls of the woman. She's a smart character, there's no doubt about that, and her plotting is a times obvious and at others, utterly opaque. Either way there's plenty of suspense and action, mixed with laughs along the way--and although the film doesn't take itself all that seriously (as indeed it shouldn't), it's a brilliant piece of film-making, and well worth the price of admission.
The roles of the characters raise some interesting side issues, however. One element that I had to consider was the role of the corrupting woman in this film, and by implication, in the genre of film noir. Although I really doubt that this film falls into the latter category, it shares many elements with it, and even at moments invokes DOUBLE INDEMNITY, the film that gave rise to the genre. The waitress in the Dendy's restaurant (which, incidentally, serves very good food) expressed a *very* positive attitude towards the character of Bridget, despite admitting that she is, essentially, a conniving bitch you'd really rather not know personally. While I fully admit that feminism is about giving women choices (including the choice to be conniving bitches), I'm not entirely sure that this film has shaken itself free of the older ideas about the woman-as-corrupter. This element was important in the 1940s as an expression of the puritanism and misogyny of the cinema of the day, but what does it suggest to the audiences of 1994? Mind you, THE LAST SEDUCTION doesn't insist on the same moral ending as a film of the 1940's would, so maybe I'm leading myself up the garden path here.
What I *am* sure of, though, is the continued stereotyping of drug dealers in Hollywood films. It seems that every bad guy in a film these days is a drug dealer. There used to be some variety on this score (note that THE GETAWAY breaks this pattern, but is a remake of a much older film), but today it has become a cliche. It's a sign of the strength of this film, though, that neither of these particular cliches get in the way of what is, essentially, a very fun film to watch.
-- Phil.
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