No Psycho, No Drama
Caldwell, Christopher
Movies No Psycho, No Drama By Christopher Caldwell In Money, Martin Amis described how Broadway, curving through Manhattan, "always contrives to be just that little bit shittier than the zones...
...They drug his Scotch, drown him in the tub, load him into a wicker basket, and dump him into the school swimming pool...
...Stone understands, on the contrary, that genuine bitches are quick thinkers only in matters that affect their own interest...
...And there's a case to be made that the amount of tender touching between Mia and Nicole is meant to imply a blossoming of The Love That Dare Not Endanger Box-Office Receipts...
...Guy Baran (Chazz Palminteri) runs a third-rate boys' school somewhere outside of Pittsburgh...
...And neither are you, if you think about it...
...He tyrannizes the students, beats his wife Mia (Isabelle Adjani) silly, and humiliates her publicly, even obliquely derogating her sexual technique over dinner at high table...
...Unluckily for Guy, Nicole is Mia's confidante and best friend...
...It's lonely without God," Nicole remarks, but all the theology does is render the film slightly pompous...
...It's also a waste of time, since this movie already has a faith behind it: viz., feminism of the "gender" variety...
...This, we are given to understand, is what men always say when they lack the testosterone to get a woman into bed...
...Just minutes into the movie, smarting over their respective physical and psychic wounds, they are commiserating about Guy's abuse...
...This growing tenderness between the two women is the signal innovation in the American version...
...You're feeling guilty," says a detective (Kathy Bates) working the case...
...It's not your fault...
...Once that has been done, the rest of the action, pretty much unchanged from the French version, makes no sense...
...The characters' motivations come unhinged from their actions, leaving a psychodrama without psychology...
...To which Lisa replies: "Well, I'm gonna have an anesthetic, for God's sake...
...Twenty bucks they killed him . . . Dykes," says a workman watching Mia and Nicole emerge from the school building...
...Movies No Psycho, No Drama By Christopher Caldwell In Money, Martin Amis described how Broadway, curving through Manhattan, "always contrives to be just that little bit shittier than the zones through which it bends...
...At one point, Nicole tells Mia, "I'm not sorry...
...And with Nicole doing most of the urging, they decide to knock him off...
...She's a flighty ex-nun with a heart condition, and the slightest shock could kill her...
...To accommodate it, the original ending- among the most brilliant in film history-must be sacrificed...
...A young tramp named Lisa appears at the school one afternoon to report that Guy has knocked her up and to demand money for an abortion...
...Mia says, "Abortion is murder...
...But predictably, the men are either sadistic perverts or impotent wussies who deserve to die...
...But ordinary religious responses would be so anomalous in a film for the nineties that Mia is made an ex-nun and goes through all sorts of candle-lighting mumbo-jumbo that has more in common with voodoo than with any recognizable Catholicism...
...Bringing something into the nineties, to use producer Robinson's phrase, is generally a euphemism for taking all its main characters and turning them into homosexuals...
...In other matters the operative mood is one of luggish, stolid piggyness...
...However sexual the bond, it is undoubtedly "sisterhood"-a keen appreciation of what scumbags men are-that draws the killers closer as the noose tightens around them...
...Almost without exception, the new versions, while not bad, are just that little bit coarser than the originals...
...They should put it in bombs...
...Killing him is a good thing...
...The dialogue occasionally refutes the idea that feminism and humor are incompatible...
...More likely, director Chechik simply figured that, if you've got Sharon Stone and Isabelle Adjani in the same movie, you might as well have them paw each other a bit...
...The temptation in such roles is to camp it up, to spit out one's lines with sassy self-satisfaction, as if bitchery were a subcategory of wit...
...As executive producer James G. Robinson said, he and his director, fashion photographer Jeremiah Chechik, hope "to bring the story and characters into the nineties...
...Then evidence begins to surface that Guy isn't quite dead...
...Guy treats his mistress Nicole (Sharon Stone) little better...
...It's men...
...In like fashion, American directors continue to cut a swath through the entire repertoire of French cinema, copying classic films...
...Testosterone...
...And that is a faith that offers plenty of absolution...
...The latest of these is Diabolique, a remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot's Hitch-cockian thriller Les Diaboliques (1955...
...In the original film, this occasioned real moral meditation, as the pious Venezuelan wife was overcome with fears of damnation...
...Nicole is the cooler of the two customers, and Stone plays an excellent bitch...
Vol. 1 • April 1996 • No. 29
