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PREFAB You know from the very start Body Heat, Lawrence Kasdan’s début as director, is going to be an overconfident sleaze noir. Those credits in a Galleria font, the wavy suggestive backdrop and John Barry’s sultry pay-for-your-sins music are the collective alert of a moviemaker who hasn’t any doubt about having achieved what’s about to be set before us. That’s the movie’s real pleasure—it’s pre-fab, packaged so all the kinks have been worked out. Well, not all: the screenplay’s early sex repartee between William Hurt and Kathleen Turner is like a embarrassing fart you can’t prevent from leaking in front of others, and Turner, the 80s version of Lana Turner out of The Postman Always Rings Twice, way over-prepped. (And sometimes she looks more masculine than her co-star.) If there’s major criticism, it’s the movie’s insistency: Kasdan, also writing the script, is determined to make a lughead out of incompetent lawyer Hurt. We haven’t any response other than contempt; not only does he look boozed up—and in his last scenes very booze-bloated—there’s no way we can disregard his smoking immediately after jogging, which is to say he’s asking for it. Overall, the temperature of oozing noiriness—the chimes, Barry’s hot-to-trot score (with track titles like “I’m Weak” and “Kill for Pussy”), the fog, Turner’s bathtub, Kim Zimmer—may get you more heated than the sex scenes. Drenched in animalism, they might turn on incels but most of us won’t be able to see the glands for the outsized connection between heightened banging and the deeply criminal. Kasden isn’t dirty-minded enough to give us double hard-ons. He’s repeatedly said he’d never do a sequel, but for a while the public demand for one seemed ripe for Hurt to track down Turner and get a load at what she’s become. Hurt’s passing ceases any further consideration. The one-hit sex slayer of the 80s, who proudly professes to be a better Maggie and Martha than who originated them in the movies, is now the caftan-clad mirror image. She’s still got one commodity to push—the sultry voice, deepened as if in consumption. Caitlyn might want to hire her for some home schooling, to make sexier the “his” in her voice box.
Text COPYRIGHT © 2001 RALPH BENNER (Revised 4/2022) All Rights Reserved. |
