Killing Me Softly
By Paolo Marocco

The Plot

Alice is a young career woman in the world of web site designing, Adam is a famous, strong and attractive mountain climber: they touch hands before crossing the street and passion explodes between them: running away from the office, taxi, "what is your name"..."I'm Alice", "Hello, Alice", and boom, moutaineer's apartment, boom boom, muscles to support her. She lives with an engineer who's a tad boring and leaves him without thinking twice, abandoning herself to her new flame, but… the obscure Adam is a little dangerous when his hormones are taking over. And then there are hidden letters, anonymous phone calls and messages, the former girlfriend mysteriously killed in the mountains… In short, something is wrong...

Seeing these films, it looks like the e-commerce, the net-business, the dot com are magic: all it takes is a click, a couple of idiocies (as does Heather Graham's character), some things from trendy magazines for women and the billions come easily and without much effort. The virtual "click", actually the web's artificiality, seen as a sort of technological star-system, leads to the real "click" just before crossing the street: adopted by Kaige as a place to exchange glances, souls, bodies, city, mountains, eletronics etc etc - these are as fake and imaginary as the billionaire sites. It is the projection of a world full of stereotypes, in the style of fiction for TV. Kaige makes a thriller on these foundations and, as a good Chinese who emigrates to London, he obviously attempts to copy the master of this genre, Sir Alfred (from Suspicion or Under the Capricorn), by using the story of the woman in love who suspects her husband, making it in a way that her suspects are also the audience's, until... we cannot tell more. Kaige, who leaves everything to the aesthetic apparatus from recent European movies, seems to be a little unprepared for a western thriller. He doesn't manage to explore the point between the mystery and eternity from the mountains (among other things, there aren't exteriors on true mountains, just little hills, and the rest is made up: maybe there wasn't money...) and the new technological realities from the city. The mechanism of suspense is too obvious, too declared, with the music exploding in every promising scene. The film is well put together here and there, but the rest is a little weak.

The Actors

Joseph Fiennes, the youngest of the family (the eldest is Ralph), is taking the triumph of stardom from his elder brother: he became famous to the great audiences by playing the main character from Shakespeare in Love, and then continued with directors like Paul Schrader and Milcho Manchevski, played the role of the political officer in Jean-Jacques Annaud's Enemy at the Gates, also starring Jude Law. In Killing me Softly, he gained 20 Kg. Obscure and violent, he uses his big eyes and his very sexy lips to his heart's content.

His leading lady Heather Graham (both are from 1970) started her movie career much earlier, playing a small part in Ivan Reitman's Twins, and shortly after that playing opposite Matt Dillon in Gus Van Saint's Drugstore Cowboy. After some 20 movies or so, in which nobody notices her, the delicate but determined little blonde is more noticeable in Boogie Nights, Lost in Space and Austin Powers 2. In this film, now as a star, she plays the naïve girl who suddenly discovers the evil in the world.