Movie Review: Color Of Night (1994)

A psychosexual suspense thriller, Color Of Night is a lurid mess.

New York psychiatrist Dr. Bill Capa (Bruce Willis) is shocked when one of his patients commits suicide. He relocates to Los Angeles to de-stress and reconnects with an old colleague, the vastly successful Dr. Bob Moore (Scott Bakula). Capa attends a group therapy session at Moore's office consisting of five disturbed patients: sex-obsessed Sondra (Lesley Ann Warren), obsessive-compulsive lawyer Clark (Brad Dourif), artist Casey (Kevin J. O'Connor), grieving widower Buck (Lance Henriksen) and the young Richie, who is suffering through a gender identity crisis.

Moore discloses that he has been receiving death threats, and one of the five patients is the likely suspect. Sure enough Moore is soon killed, and police Lieutenant Hector Martinez (Ruben Blades) asks Capa to take over the group sessions to try and identify the killer. Capa finds himself getting embroiled in the complex lives of the patients, and soon meets and starts a steamy relationship with the free spirited and mysterious Rose (Jane March).

Color Of Night is One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest with the inmates not only running the asylum but also writing the script, and suddenly all is forgiven if Nurse Ratched would only come back. Boasting a plot that can only be described as batshit crazy, the film is a bewildering mix of amateur psychiatry, salacious eroticism and slasher horror.

Produced by Andrew Vajna and directed by Richard Rush, Color Of Night ventures into a mishmash of psychological and societal topics in search of maximum shock value. The downstream impacts of child abuse, the trauma of losing loved ones, gender identity, a spectacular suicide, multiple personality disorder, murder most gory, superfluous sex and nudity, a case of infidelity linking a police officer with a surviving victim of crime, bondage imagery, obsessive compulsive behaviour, an irrelevant car chase and one attempted murder-by-car-drop are all somehow wedged into the same story.

And weaving yet another thread through the jumbled ball of psychobabble is Dr. Capa suffering from trauma-induced color-blindness, an inability to see red due to the New York suicide of his patient, a condition unlikely to be resolved by the upcoming events in Los Angeles.

It all sounds like fertile ground for bad Mel Brooks-style comedy, but there is not a hint of irony or wit to be found. Instead Color Of Night is delivered as a straight-up neo-noir, complete with mumbled intermittent narration by Dr. Capa, mostly to describe the wispy Rose every time she approaches him in various variations of not-there outfits. But to Rush's credit, he does manage to hold the outlandish plot together, and as far as the film strays away from credibility, it does adhere to a perverse logic of its own creation within all the sleazy-chic sets.

Bruce Willis cruises through the film with a general attitude of cool bemusement in what turned out out to be training grounds for a much better second outing into the world of helping troubled minds. Jane March follows up one almost-always-naked film with another, and here her performance alternates between cringe-worthy and not bad, her less flighty scenes carrying admirable intensity.

Color Of Night is bad enough to be enjoyed, a sordid exercise in excess that splatters into strangely compelling wreckage.

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Movie Review: The Lover (1992)

Based on the memoirs of author Marguerite Duras, The Lover chronicles an illicit affair between a teenaged French schoolgirl and a wealthy older Chinese man in 1920s Vietnam. The film is lyrical and alluring, but emotionally rather limited.

The characters do not have names. The Young Girl (Jane March) is from a poor family, her father dead, her mother struggling to run a school in rural Vietnam, her older brother abusive and drug-addicted, and her younger brother weak and submissive. On one of her trips to Saigon to attend boarding school, the Young Girl meets The Chinese Man (Tony Leung), a rich son of a business tycoon. He gives her a ride in his chauffeur-driven luxury car, she lies about her age, and soon they are having an affair. They meet regularly in his bachelor's apartment in a poor part of Saigon, making love all afternoon and sometimes all night.

The affair takes over the Girl's life, disrupting her school attendance and worsening the rift with her family. Her brother and mother are horrified that the Girl is the mistress of a Chinese man, but even more annoyed that she is not getting paid for it. The Chinese Man meanwhile is heading towards an arranged marriage, and the affair comes to an end when he gets married and the Girl heads back to France.

The Lover is a simple story with a couple of points of interest. The Young Girl is from the colonialist French theoretically attempting to dominate south east Asia, yet she plays the submissive role in the relationship with the wealthy Chinese Man, himself not in his native country. The Young Girl's dysfunctional family background helps her to throw herself into the illicit relationship, since what she is getting herself into hardly jeopardizes a happy existence.

Jean-Jacques Annaud makes the most of the Vietnam locations, capturing a lush sun-drenched country, bustling streets, ferries at over-capacity, colonialist architecture, rickshaws everywhere, and extremes of wealth and poverty. His other focus is on the endless scenes of lovemaking in the bachelor's apartment, The Lover drifting into soft-core territory and courting controversy with Jane March having just turned 18 during filming, and rumours that some of the scenes were unsimulated.

March and Leung are not required to do much emotional acting, their characters stunted by the limits of a relationship that was never going to be about much of anything other than sex. The gaps in social class, age, and ethnicity only serve to ensure that the inevitable ending is hastened. The narration, by Jeanne Moreau, attempts to inject layers of affection and love into the affair, but it is difficult to believe that any depth existed outside the imagination of a young girl, alone and far away in a foreign land.

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