Evening Standard
June 2002
By Alexander Walker
I don't blame Chen Kaige for this incredibly inept movie. Yes, he's Chinese - director of Farewell, My Concubine. But it's not culture shock that's produced such a hilarious dud.
No one could - or should - get away with a movie like this today. In the 1930s or 1940s, yes: when Joan Fontaine would have married handsome Cary Grant, then begun to suspect he is planning to knock her off. Quite natural back then.
Even by the 1950s, when Joan Crawford was going through her menopausal melodrama phase and inviting similar sinister attentions from personable lady killers in Sudden Fear or Female on the Beach, audiences would guilelessly collude with the story.
But not now, not today, and not in contemporary London where Alice (played by teeny-voiced Heather Graham), plain girl from the Middle West, unwisely walks out on her English boyfriend when she presses the street-crossing button at the same moment as dark and rakish Adam (Joseph Fiennes). The next minute both are tearing each other's kit off like cabbage leaves and he's swearing: "I love you so much, I could break your neck."
Adam is a world-famous mountain climber; when not having it off on the horizontal, he's knocking off vertical conquests. To show the man he is behind his designer stubble, he chases a mugger and beats him to a pulp with the door of a red phone-box.
As police and bystanders close in warily, the stars go into a clinch over the chap's body. No time for statements. "Marry me," he cries, planting a blood-stained kiss on her lips.
They beat it up to one of those English churches that wed you at a minute's notice; in even less time, he's commanding his new bride to strip off behind the tombstones, get into hiking clobber and follow his spoor to a forest hut ablaze with enough candles to roast an ox. There he ropes her to a climbing crampon with a 10-metre length of silk for a little tight-knotted copulation.
The pseudonymous team of "Nicci French" (actually Nicci Gerard and husband Sean French), who wrote the original novel, maybe know something that connects rope climbing to sexual bondage, but it all gets so wildly out of hand that when Alice in a mini-nightie is tied to the kitchen table the effect is uproarious, rather than erotic.
The best to be said of such a film is that it is a collectors' piece. Things you thought had breathed their last in the "golden oldies" that the "Nicci French" duo must have watched until their eyeballs popped are shame-lessly resuscitated. Poison-pen letters alleging Adam raped the sender; sinister faxes from one Joanna Noble of The Guardian (Yasmin Bannerman) suggesting he's killed other ladies; shoals of letters from Adam's ex-lovers falling out of cupboards like a snow drift ... "I know he's unpredictable," Alice murmurs, "but is he a murderer?"
An echo of Joan Crawford in Autumn Leaves, discovering that the golden lad she's married is a liar, thief, ex-convict, near-bigamist and latent killer, yet asking herself: "Does he still love me?"
Alice runs for advice to Adam's sinister sister Deborah (Natasha McElhone). Bad mistake. Then disguised by heavy reading spectacles as Ms Noble of The Guardian - "My editor could sack me!" gasps that newspaper's journo - she turns sleuth and ends up recounting her fears to an all-night cop (Ian Hart) while shivering under a police blanket - with no one believing her. Why would they? In such films, they never do.
