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Killing Me Softly
**1/2
Cinema Releases - June 21, 2002
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 18. USA-UK.
100 minutes. Directed by Chen Kaige. Written by Kara Lindstrom; from the
novel by Nicci French. Starring Heather Graham, Joseph Fiennes, Natasha McElhone,
Jason Hughes, Ian Hart.
"Killing Me Softly" fails so
fundamentally on every conventional level that it achieves some kind of goofy
grandeur and fascination. This is not a good movie, but it holds our attention
by shamelessly conveying the air of a lurid, trashy paperback.
Heather Graham stars as a girl from rural America
working in London as a web designer. In voice-over narration she describes
herself as a "flatlander" who is beginning to get curious about the strangest
realms of human relationships. One day she meets Joseph Fiennes at a pedestrian
crossing; their hands touch as they reach for the button, their eyes meet,
and they can't get out of each other's minds.
Graham soon leaves her boyfriend to go have animal
sex on Fiennes's floor. He's mysterious and stiff, but hey, he's good in
bed (and up against tables), and so the relationship carries on, even when
anonymous one-line warning letters show up out of the blue at Graham's apartment.
Graham figures that the best way to find out more about the mysterious Fiennes
would be to marry him, so the couple runs off and elopes in the country.
The honeymoon involves a five-mile hike in English woodland, to reach a candlelit
cottage where the lovers perform breathless sexual rituals involving long
drapes of toilet roll.
The story builds into one of obsession, mystery
and passion. It's supposed to be Hitchcockian -- like "Vertigo", perhaps,
even though its tone has more to do with "Marnie", with bits of B-movies
like "Original Sin" and "Eye of the Beholder" thrown in just for fun. "Killing
Me Softly" is a mysterious and sordid tale of attraction, building to a twist
that would be straight out of the slasher genre if it didn't involve incest.
It's also a film that features the astonishing sight of someone getting killed
by way of a flare gun.
There is a lot of weird stuff along this journey.
When Fiennes first recalls his climbing exploits, he asks, "Do you know what
it's like at 20,000 feet?" Then he pulls a goldfish out of its tank, and
we see a close-up of it wriggling, and are told, "It's like -- THIS!" There's
another scene in which Fiennes ties Graham to a table while insisting, "You
must trust me! I've nothing to hide!" There are oddly soft and dreamy shots
of nothing in particular. And then there are the sex scenes -- grabby, grunty,
breathless, with echoing moans dubbed over the top.
The whole thing is flat, clunky and ridiculous.
But I kinda enjoyed it. One must have a sense of humour about trash to get
through the amount of movies I see, and a film like "Killing Me Softly" gives
the viewer a lot to giggle over. It's too bad to get a bad review, and Graham,
in the lead role, is animated enough to be enjoyable, mincing around with
strained eyes as if she's trying to look worried in reaction to the pointlessly
soupy music on the soundtrack.
If the movie doesn't quite work as a guilty pleasure,
it's because concerned discomfort sometimes sets in while watching Graham,
who is too precious an actress to be taking her clothes off for material
worth nothing more than cheap laughter. And because Fiennes, so witty in
"Shakespeare in Love", is nothing but annoying here, sporting a motionless
glare-grin that doesn't let us know if he's holding back chuckles or weighing
up whether to rape someone. The director of "Killing Me Softly" was Chen
Kaige, the renowned Chinese filmmaker behind "Farewell, My Concubine". I
have no idea what he was thinking with this, but now it's time to write it
off as a bad trip and get back to making art films.
COPYRIGHT©
2002 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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