THE LAST SEDUCTION
A film review by Eric Grossman
Copyright 1994 LOS ANGELES INDEPENDENT
A good thriller is increasingly hard to come by. All too often, filmmakers rely on tired genre conventions and clics that never raise the audience's heart rate above resting. Fortunately, THE LAST SEDUCTION, playing at Laemmle's Sunset-5, does not fall into this trap. Director John Dahl, who has traveled the cinematic road of film noir before with his two previous outings, KILL ME AGAIN and RED ROCK WEST, does a superb job in creating subtle, powerful tension in this simple but engaging story.
Linda Fiorentino gives as a good of a performance that I have seen this year as Bridget Gregory, a smart, sexy, nefarious woman who decides to double-cross her seemingly clean-cut husband, Clay (Bill Pullman), who has just received a large amount of cash from a drug-deal. Bridget takes off with the cash and leaves New York as quickly as possible for Chicago. On the way, she stops in the small town of Beston where she meets Mike Swale (Peter Berg), a small town guy who wants to be bigger than what destiny has planned for him. Mike immediately falls for Bridget and hopes that her big-city attitude and pedigree will rub off on him. With the advice of her lawyer (J.T. Walsh), Bridget decides to lay low for a while in Beston and she soon seduces Mike to participate in her twisted schemes.
The movie is simple enough, but what is interesting is how Dahl and screenwriter Steve Barancik hook us in with essentially three characters and a small town. The movie works on a psychological level, the place where all thrillers function best. There are no big car-chases, no big gun-fights, no buckets of blood, just an amazingly well written, well acted set of characters, particularly Fiorentino. She is so cold-hearted, so conniving, so mean, and unfortunately for the men who get involved with her, so sexy that we cannot help but be fascinated by her. The movie takes the femme fatale to new heights and while this may or may not be progress, we now have a movie where the woman is truly more smart, more cunning and more dangerous than the men around her.
What also makes Fiorentino's performance so good is that Peter Berg and Bill Pullman play so well against her. Berg is able to find the right balance of naive, neediness and suppressed anger for his character. Bill Pullman, with his wild facial expressions and pseudo-calm dialogue creates a sympathetic character whose biggest fault is that he is smart, but not smart enough to keep up with his tricky wife.
Besides allowing Bridget and Mike to meet, the small town setting for the film was a crucial choice. There is a scene where Bridget is walking down a Beston sidewalk and she is taken aback when strangers smile and say hello. She is out of her environment but it is fun to watch how quickly she masters and manipulates it as well as its people.
Fresh and original, THE LAST SEDUCTION has all that is good about a small, independent film while having the production values of a studio picture. Linda Pearl's production design, Jeffrey Jur's cinematography and Eric L. Beason's editing are all first rate. If you like film noir, good filmmaking, and suspense, go see this film.
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