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Man, is this lousy. It doesn't deserve much in the way of comment so, keeping it brief, Rebecca DeMornay is a highly disciplined police psychiatrist who falls for Latin Lover Antonio Banderas in a wine store, he of the ponytail and jail-house tats. When she cuts loose, she really cuts loose. Other than this torrid affair she's having (and we must admit the affair has its speed bumps) she's a pretty cold fish. Her broke, ailing father shows up for the first time in years and she boots him out. She's also adept at keeping her horny upstairs neighbor (Dennis Miller) at bay. And there's prisoner Harry Dean Stanton who's trying to maneuver her into giving him a diagnosis of multiple personality disorder so he won't have his privates nailed to the wall for the serial murders he's committed.
All these people, and perhaps more, are immediately suspect when strange things begin happening to her. Somebody sends her dead flowers. Somebody does unspeakable things to her pet cat. (The next time I see a household pet turn up in a parcel or strung up in the closet or boiled in a pot, I'm going to puke.) So who's doing it? Guess. No power on earth could force me to reveal the ending, but maybe a hint will help: childhood abuse.
The abuse excuse is an interesting business in itself, far more interesting than the movie. What does "childhood abuse" mean? Do we mean sexual abuse? Physical? Both? How about whacking a kid over the back with a wooden cooking spoon, hard enough to break it? That's what happened to me and my brother when we were kids, just as similar things happened to all the other errant boys in the neighborhood. Sexual abuse? That never happened to any of us, as far as I know, although I'm not sure it would have been rejected with any degree of animation. In the Samoan village I studied for two years, there was one case of an adolescent boy found playing sexually with a much younger girl. The girl's family beat hell out of him. The boy's own family sent him to live with another branch of the family in another village, an exile that lasted two years. By the time he returned the incident was forgotten by everyone, including the child. (By the way, the little girl we see here is under five so it's unlikely that she'd remember Dad's night-time visits in any case since long-term memory isn't really established until about that time.) DeMornay's experience leading to her mental disorder can be called "the social construction of trauma." It's not there unless we put it there. Enough of the psychiatric lecture. That will be fifteen cents.
You want trauma? I'll give you trauma. The film absolutely forces us to identify with Rebecca DeMornay's character, right from the beginning. Then, when she has her first tryst with Antonio Banderas, and Pio Donnagio's score is pounding the eroticism into our heads, the camera gives us a shot from over her shoulder of the bare-torsoed Antonio crawling over us with his hairy chest. Now THAT'S traumatic. It makes any male viewer feel as if he's on the floor of the laundry room at the California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo. Don't get me wrong. I don't dislike Antonio Banderas. It's just that I'm not in love with him. There aren't enough nude shots of Rebecca DeMornay's elfin body in the entire universe to compensate for that kind of anxiety.
Here's an engaging way of surviving this movie. Instead of just sitting there puling, try picking out the scenes that were filmed in Toronto and separating them from the ones shot in Budapest. It's a challenge, really, and may, for all we know, preserve your sanity.


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