Killing Me Softly

(Chen Kaige, USA/UK, 2002)

Many erotic thrillers can be classified by the cities in which they are set: romantic Paris, mysterious Vienna, underworld New York. But erotic thrillers set in London form an especially strange set. Tales of forbidden, perverse, transgressive passion are put into weird relief when placed against the all-too-mundane bookstores, coffee shops and leisure centres of contemporary London.

Intriguingly, such films are often made by distinguished outsiders to the city: Louis Malle's Damage (1992), Patrice Chereau's Intimacy (2001) and Chen Kaige's Killing Me Softly. The first English-language production by Chen, adapted by Kara Lindstrom from a novel by Nicci French, was reportedly bedevilled by many problems. The result is awful, although compulsively so.

Alice (Heather Graham) is stuck in a staid, cosy relationship until her hand inadvertently touches that of Adam Tallis (Joseph Fiennes) at a traffic light. Erotic obsession is born at first sight, and soon Alice is exploring the netherworld of sadomasochism with this total stranger.

Alice lives in and for the moment and asks no questions – pausing only to absorb the fact that Adam is a celebrity mountain-climber with a trauma in his recent past. But Adam brings with him some other disturbing secrets that are literally locked up in his closet.

Their whirlwind courtship leads to marriage once Adam, in the craziest scene of the year, proves his love by beating the stuffing out of a passing mugger. This tableau – a straight-faced depiction of amour fou's dizziest height! – also serves to sideswipe Alice's best friend, one of the film's sensible ordinary characters, right out of the picture, left speechless (like the viewer) on the street.

But from then on it's Alice Tallis versus the Phallus. She becomes an amateur investigator in order to explore her increasingly deranged husband's dark past. Meanwhile, Adam's sister, Deborah (Natascha McElhone), glows with the hint of every kind of dark perversion. The surprise ending can be glimpsed coming from a long way off.

Everything in this film is absurd – every costume change, hairdo, location, every baroque/fiddly camera move. Graham gives the worst performance of her career, all little-girl flutters and frights. Fiennes, after this and Paul Schrader's equally odd Forever Mine (2000), has become a larger-than-life figure of raging, sick passion – the muscular, romantic, male hero taken way over the top into ridiculous comedy.

Alice, in one of several pseudo-philosophical musings, wonders: "Can one live at these heights?" (cueing still more snowy mountain footage). It has been a long time, alas, since movies have been able to sustain the unreal intensity that once powered heightened romances by Michael Powell or Alfred Hitchcock. In London stories like Killing Me Softly, everyday murkiness keeps snuffing out the will to transcendence.

MORE Chen: The Emperor and the Assassin

© Adrian Martin November 2002