Film

Rip It Up, Issue 96, 1 July 1985, Page 10

Film

CRIMES OF PASSION Director: Ken Russell Ken Russell certainly has a style like a proverbial sledgehammer. If art should be judged by its ability to shock and provoke, then a good two-thirds of Crimes of Passion is eminently successful art. If the sexual content and language don’t manage to get a few hackles up (and Barry Sandler's script is a few hundred degrees more steamy than his 1982 Making Love) then the sexual violence certainly will, especially the drawn-out sequence involving the terrorisation of the heroine. I suspect that some won’t even make it past the blatantly sexist joke which opens the movie. The theme has echoes of Bunuel’s Belle de Jour and Somerset Maugham’s Rain which, in its 1954 filming as Miss Sadie Thompson, was carried along by Rita Hayworth’s ebullient vulgarity. Kathleen Turner is obviously having a ball as the hard-bitten China Blue in the Russell film, swaggering around the back streets of Hollywood, swinging her handbag to a soundtrack of pepped-up New World Symphony and Onward Christian Soldiers', as is Anthony Perkins in what must be his most over-the-top performance to date. The problems with Crimes of Passion lie in the remaining third of the film which attempts to dissect the strained marriage of John Laughlin and his wife and yet finds itself wallowing in banality. If Russell could have given this aspect of his movie the punch of the bizarre video clip that the couple watch in bed, then this could have provided a useful balance to the rest of the film. At one point Perkins asks Turner, “How low can you go?". Her retort is “As low as you can afford." One hopes that Russell finds more edifying material for his next movie. ANOTHER COUNTRY Director: Marek Kanievska Britain has certainly had its fair share of political scandals over the last few decades, from Burgess

and McClean through to the relatively recent disclosure that the noted art historian and establishment figure, Sir Anthony Blunt, had led a double life as a Soviet spy. Julian Mitchell’s original play traced the origins of such activities to that bastion of respectability, the English public school. Unlike the stage play, which had a more static setting, most of the. film is revealed in flashback as an ageing Guy Bennett (Rupert Everett) is interviewed in his rather dowdy Moscow apartment. We are transported to the 30s and, within the “other country” of the anonymous public school, the young men play out their games and rituals. The occasional scene outside, such as that with Bennett’s mother (a delicious cameo by Anna Massey), only serves to highlight the overpowering isolation of the school itself. There is none of the surrealism and hard-left politics that Lindsay Anderson used in his If rather, Mitchell’s elegantly-written script focuses on a handful of characters and the hypocrisy and obsessiveness that the environment engenders. Occasionally, the satire at the expense of the English class structure may seem a little heavily drawn and many points in Another Country are not made with the greatest subtlety bennett’s self-accepting sexual preferences are shown rather coyly through his breathless yet very proper romance with the young Harcourt and Tommy Judd (Colin Firth) is so committed to left-wing politics that he reads Marx by torchlight and has a statuette of Lenin beside him on the park

bench. However, with the Norman Joneses and Keith Hays perpetuating their bigotry with such vociferousness, perhaps subtlety is not the order of the day and, within its cultural limitations, Another Country has been given a timely and unexpectedly topical release.