Ain't It Cool News
June 4, 2002
By Elaine

Hey folks, Harry here with Elaine's look at Chen Kaige's film Killing Me Softly, which is apparently destined to be cut up into naked Heather Graham clips available for downloads at some future date by those celebrity porn sites. However, the film doesn't sound like there's much more use for it. Though, nude Heather Graham is always something to cheer about, and Joseph Fiennes is someone waiting to bust out big! Unfortunately, not in this film.

Killing Me Softly is a project that generated a lot of buzz about a year ago, mostly in connection with Heather Graham's oft-uncovered boobs. There was a fairly favourable test screening report, then a Japanese trailer featuring a lot of Graham nudity, and then the trail went dead. No more reports. As if no one was interested in Chen Kaige's first English-language film, based on Nicci French's erotic thriller about passion, paranoia, living on the edge and giving up control over one's life. Now the film is finally being released in Europe, and fans of the skimpy-skirts-in-winter-and-kinky-sex-in-candle-lit-rooms genre have a chance to see what it is all about. It basically boils down to this. Heather Graham is Alice, a sweet, slightly naive American living in London. Alice has a nice job, a nice house and a nice but predictable boyfriend (Jake Hughes of "This Life" fame) who is as crazy about her as he is about football. She seems content. Then, however, she bumps into Adam (Joseph Fiennes), a mountaineer with dark, brooding eyes and a powerful physical presence, and suddenly she realises that there is more to life than merely being happy. She wants action. Risk. Mystery. She feels attracted to Adam, who oozes passion, and five minutes into their acquaintance, she gets into a taxi with him to experience the hardness of his kitchen table. Virtually overnight, she leaves her boyfriend to marry the mysterious Adam, whose only links to the past appear to be an alluring sister (Natascha McElhone, sadly underused) and a photo of a former lover who died during a mountaineering accident. And then strange stuff starts happening. Confused by some of Adam's weird traits, but still violently in love with him, Alice starts receiving anonymous notes warning her that Adam may not be the man she thinks he is. Disturbing facts about Adam's past are unearthed. Alice grows increasingly paranoid, realising with a chill that Adam has a cupboard with an awfully large padlock on it. And suddenly she begins to wonder whether Adam's predilection for tying long pieces of cloth around her neck while making love to her is all that innocent, and whether the line between love and madness isn't a bit too fine in Adam's case. So she starts digging in his past. Well, what would you do?

To be honest, I can see why Killing Me Softly was kept on the shelf for so long. For although Graham gets her kit off a lot and Joseph Fiennes has the most smouldering eyes of any actor currently working, Killing Me Softly is a disappointment. Not only is it the most implausible film since, well, "Wild Things," but it's so unsubtle it occasionally borders on the preposterous. It's predictable and far less scary than the subject matter should warrant. And most of all, it's not a Chen Kaige film. It may bear his name, but it has nothing to do with his previous work.

You see, Chen Kaige is at his best when he's dealing with folklore. When he has a small cast of rustic characters doing exotic stuff in the wind-swept, yellow loess landscape of Northern China's Shanxi province. The moment Chen starts working with a large cast, and moving them to the city, his films lose their appealing emotional simplicity, although there is usually enough period detail, stunning cinematography and subtlety at hand to make up for the lack of emotional involvement. Sadly, however, there is little of Chen's old magic in Killing Me Softly. To be sure, it all looks nice and colourful (a Chen trademark), but when a movie is supposed to be a modern film noir, as I think this one was, bright colours aren't necessarily a good thing. But it isn't just about atmosphere. On top of getting the mood wrong, Chen has no feeling for the characters, who are far more modern and unrestrained than his average protagonist. They do things no other Chen character has ever done. They carry mobile phones. They analyse men and women's different reactions to computer games. And most of all, they get laid. All over the place. On the rug. On the kitchen table. In front of the hearth fire. On the doorstep. Against the wall. On a graveyard. Everywhere.

Now I guess it's only logical that a film about passion and sexual obsession should contain a bit of sex. Nor do I particularly mind watching beautiful people like Heather Graham and Joseph Fiennes getting it on. But I do mind OD-ing on sex when I'm watching a movie made by a director known for subtle innuendo ρρ a movie, moreover, which tries to evoke the film noir atmosphere of Hitchcock's Suspicion, to which it shows more than a passing resemblance.

What can I say? Killing Me Softly is not a film noir. It is altogether too bright, too outspoken and too unsubtle to be even remotely confusing, and too explicit to be erotic or thrilling. Both the characters and the situations in which they find themselves are badly drawn. Adam is too macho, too unbalanced to inspire the insane trust Alice has in him, while Alice herself is too vapid to get as obsessed with her partner's past as she does. Her descent from self-confident womanhood to nervous-wreckdom comes about so fast it rings false. So does the ending, which is abrupt to say the least. Most of all, though, the film lacks atmosphere. Although there are a few moments of suspense, there is no real fear, no real paranoia, no darkness. So little is left to the viewer's imagination that there is no sense of mystery, no real doubt as to what is going on. All one is left with is a series of increasingly ridiculous plot twists that will have even the most uncritical viewer murmur, "Yeah, right." And not even Heather Graham's frequently naked body can make up for that.

Now I'm not saying that Graham is to blame for the failure of the film. On the contrary; she does pretty well with the material she's given, although her part would have benefitted from her being slightly less naive. Fiennes is quite acceptable, too, although he often overdoes the dark, brooding thing and seems a bit too aware of the effect he has on Alice. It's just that the script (written by Kara Lindstrom, who should stick to what she's good at: production design) lets the actors down horribly. And as if that weren't bad enough, there's Patrick Doyle's music, which has a tendency to swell to full orchestral strength at moments which should have been left quiet. It's hard to check, but I suspect that the film would have been more successful without the score. It still wouldn't have been great, though. Not for all the times Graham gets her stylish kit off.

Here's hoping Chen Kaige will soon return to his Chinese roots, which suit him far better than modern-Hollywood-style faux-noir. How about a new Life on a String, Mr Chen?