Sight & Sound Magazine
July 2002
By Philip Kemp
Alice Loudon is a young American living in London in an easy-going relationship with her boyfriend Jake. On her way to work one day she meets a charismatic stranger whom she discovers to be Adam Tallis, a famous mountaineer. They meet again and at once embark on a passionate affair. Alice leaves the devastated Jake and moves in with Adam. From his sister, Deborah, she learns details of the accident in the Himalayas two years earlier when Françoise, the woman Adam loved, fell to her death with four other climbers.
Despite evidence of Adam’s violent temper, and anonymous warning notes, Alice willingly agrees to marry him. After the ceremony, in Adam’s family church high in the Lake District, he takes her to a mountain hut for a bout of candlelit sex and bondage. Back in London a reporter, Joanna Noble, who has written up an interview with Adam, sends Alice a letter she received from Michelle, a young woman who claims Adam raped her. In a locked cupboard in their flat Alice finds letters from Adele Blanchard, who evidently had a sado-masochistic affair with Adam but has since vanished. A photograph leads Alice to suspect Adele’s body may be buried in the Lake District churchyard.
Divining Alice’s suspicions, Adam ties her up and berates her for her lack of trust. She escapes and goes to the police, but they can do nothing without evidence. Desperate, she flees to Deborah, who confirms her fears. They drive together to the Lake District; Adam, guessing where they’ve gone, follows. At the churchyard they uncover Adele’s body. Deborah reveals she killed both Adele and Françoise out of incestuous jealousy. She’s about to kill Alice when Adam arrives and attacks his sister. Alice finds a pistol and shoots Deborah. Two years later Alice and Adam, now separated, briefly glimpse each other at an airport.
Cross-cultural fertilisation has achieved some outstanding results in recent cinema, especially when Asian-born film-makers have been let loose on British subjects: think of the impeccably-poised ironies of Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility, or Shekhar Kapur turning his fascinated, appalled gaze on the savagery of Tudor England in Elizabeth. But there’s always the risk in these teamings that the tone may be got crucially, disastrously wrong. Which is what, regrettably, has happened with Killing Me Softly, the first English-language film from the acclaimed Fifth Generation Chinese director Chen Kaige, adapted from a thriller by husband-and-wife team Nicci French.
To be fair to Chen, much of the blame should be ascribed to Kara Lindstrom’s script. "How cliché is this?" asks a minor character at one point. Very, is the answer, and that goes for most of the film. Every situation, every reaction, almost every line of dialogue seems to have been lifted from other, better movies, and psychological points are telegraphed with breathtaking crudeness. ("I could break your neck, I love you so much," growls Adam, just in case we’ve missed the point.) The basic set-up, of course, is straight out of the Hitchcock/du Maurier classic Rebecca (1940) – naïve young woman impulsively marries handsome mysterious stranger and comes to suspect sinister things in his past. Nothing wrong with that, of course - it’s served as an excellent basis for countless thrillers – but only if handled with freshness and ingenuity.
Killing Me Softly tackles the material with a brashness that not only exposes several gaping holes in the plot, but often topples it into farce. Nowhere more so than in the sex scenes. Chen has mentioned "the erotic element" as one reason he wanted to make the film, since he "would never have been allowed to film this in China". Thus unleashed, he has his leads go at it with a gusto that irresistibly recalls the spoof episode in The Tall Guy (1989) where Jeff Goldblum and Emma Thompson demolish an entire room in the eagerness of their lust. Though it could be that Fiennes and Graham threw themselves into this hyped-up rumpy-pumpy by way of refuge from their hopelessly underwritten characters. Graham, stuck with a role that calls for little but reaction, greets each situation, whether coup de foudre passion or imminent murder, with a wide-eyed, rabbit-in-the-headlights gaze, while Fiennes, baggy-trousered and designer-stubbled, gives us saturnine and enigmatic in virtually every scene.
As for the direction, there’s little of Chen’s trademark visual opulence to be seen. Some gracefully intricate panning shots apart, Killing Me Softly could be the work of any competent journeyman director. Though he deserves credit for moving into such unaccustomed territory, let’s hope that for Chen’s next venture he chooses a more congenial script.
