THE LAST SEDUCTION
A film review by Jules N. Binoculas
Copyright 1994 Jules N. Binoculas
If you're trying to make a name for yourself as a young-writer-director who loves to modernize 40's-and-50's-style neo-Hellenic-film-noir-pseudo-tragedies--have fun. But you *must* do one thing above all else: have your characters understand that anyone they meet who is beautiful--will be trying to f*** with them.
If your characters don't suspect a slap-in-the-face and a knife-in-the-back from every out-of-town brassiere with lace, then your screen-world soon becomes boring and predictable. If your characters are lucky enough to suspect trouble, and they find themselves in moral quicksand--helpless to stop it--you're in business.
But, remember: once you let us meet your sensation-loving people, you must guide us inside their psyches with gentle authority, and induce us to promise to love, cherish and stick with them to the rancid, bitter end. Otherwise, you--the director--lose your customers in a crowded, derivative, intellectual conceit--a seedy, aimless, masquerade of your own perverse creation.
Simply speaking, THE LAST SEDUCTION follows a sociopathic nymphomaniac (symbolizing ambitious urban-amorality) who's toting sin-tempting nipples and an unexplained impulse for theft and compulsive adultery; spending her spare time trying to pump in extra cash by pretending to murder other people's husbands--while she seduces a countrified stooge to do her dirty work back home. That's the easy part. The rest is more obvious.
If director, JOHN DAHL wants to make answering-machine-era adultery and murder seem fresh and promising by exposing his own jaundiced fascination with eternally predatory, insatiably manipulative Medusas, who are we to complain? If he can pull it off....
Dahl lays his talent at the feet of a famous male subconscious agenda: the repressed desire to possess a sophisticated, mysterious woman who curiously exists only to have sex with you--while convincing you to get rich being her one-and-only secret-illicit-adventure partner. An enviable lifestyle? You make the call.
On the surface, it's a harmlessly, entertaining masturbatory extrapolation of the post-50's "PLAYBOY Philosophy," and, if plotted properly, could yield a vigorous, lusty suspense-thriller--kind of like a 90's James M. Cain story of yuppie hypocrites who get their kicks murdering private detectives in sports-utility vehicles.
But, to his discredit, Mr. Dahl is so enamored with his own machinations of the "sex-and-greed-to-a-dead-end-lead" story angles, that he forgets that the most important element in a good thriller is not the "how," but the "why."
(And borrowed-twists from THE CRYING GAME, DOUBLE INDEMNITY, and BODY HEAT don't help endear us to his cerebral crusade.)
Normally, in these types of twisty, dime-store plot-gymnastics, the bewitching woman is a seemingly coincidentally placed, sensually spidery "antagonist", who draws a self-doubting, emasculated male into her hedonistic web of predatory plans. But, anxious to outdo everyone who has ever tried the genre, Mr. Dahl wants to swing both ways and make her both the opaque seductress and the carnivorous, abused, on-the-lam heroine (and corrupt anti-heroine). Where can an over-stimulated audience find some warmth and understanding? Not in this film.
The story uses so much calculation, it dilutes any developing audience-allegiances--only to drive us all nowhere but back to where we started.
Dahl kick-starts his needlessly dizzying story by reving the sensual, testicle-slicing ambition of Linda Fiorentino's Brigid (rhyming with "frigid,"--but that's where the resemblance ends).
Then we meet her hazy, dope-dealing doctor-husband, who smacks her face before she steals $350,000 of his stolen (narcotics-derived) community assets. Just another ordinary, genre-driven, domestically dysfunctional screen-squabble, updated for current social mores.
For a film reeking of ruthlessness, ironically, it's Dahl himself who commits the most unpardonable sin--allowing us to be confused by people's half-explained pasts, and fuzzy future plans. He throws away early scenes which could've helped us understand whether she's a generic sociopath, oxymoronically dominant and insecure, terminally impulsive, or just nakedly copying Hitchcock's PSYCHO, in her vain escape from New York for Chicago with $700,000 in laundered bills.
Yet, despite the schizoid character development, the film is more than marginally likable, mostly because it doesn't try to "get-heavy" with cumbersome personality explications. Unfortunately, neither does it try to "get serious" and make us care about its throbbing, but philosophically stagnant, souls.
The attempt at a deadpan tone keeps the plot afloat for a while--only to submerge it with convoluted conceits--jammed into a designer pair of black panties with nothing inside but naked schemes.
RATING: 80/100
Recommendation: If you're desperate for lusty, vicious, gonad-eating women--then treat yourself to the genuine articles: DOUBLE INDEMNITY, an X-rated wall-to-wall-flesh-fest, and a campy, Russ Meyer bosomaniacal extravaganza.
If all else fails, you can sit it out and pray that Mr. Dahl reaches narrative puberty before THE LAST SEDUCTION becomes his last attempt at noirish-homage.
14 Nov 94 Los Angeles
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