Cinema
No Escape (`15', selected cinemas) A Business Affair (`15', selected cinemas)
Tears before bedtime
Mark Steyn
'Don't think,' a fellow jailbird advises Ray Liotta in No Escape. The cell walls, you see, are fitted with special sensors enabling the guards to detect signs of men- tal activity. Clearly, something similar was installed in the director's and writers' offices before they got to work on the pic- ture. On an offshore penal colony in 2022, the convicts divide into two sides — the Insiders and the Outsiders. For two hours, you hope for a plot twist: perhaps the prison will be privatised according to mon- etarist principles and they'll be taken over by the Supply-siders. But, no. 'The audi- ence has to work at this play,' the directors of gruelling fringe drama like to say. But you have to work so hard at not thinking during this all-action pulp you wind up with one hell of a headache. Great sets, though.
In theory, A Business Affair is much more of a Spectator movie, based as it is on Bar- bara Skelton's memoirs of her brief mar- riages to Cyril Connolly and George Weidenfeld in the Fifties. Good thing this sophisticated tale of literary London didn't fall into the hands of those crass Holly- wood types, eh? Instead, backed by money from 'the Eurimages Fund of the European Council', director Charlotte Brandstrom and writer William Stadiem have moved the story from the Fifties to the Nineties and sliced about 30 stone off the leading characters: the well-rounded luxuriously- upholstered Connolly and Weidenfeld have been transformed into the rangey Jonathan Pryce and the cadaverous (and American) Christopher Walken; torn between these two skeletons, the Skelton character is now French and played by the cheekbones of Chanel model Carole Bouquet.
This is an Anglo-Franco-Spanish-Ger- man co-production, and not even the posters seem sure whether it's a comedy or drama. Mlle Bouquet is presumably there because the French wanted her; to get the Spaniards in, the principals zip off to Malaga for ten minutes to meet a bullfighting gigolo and see an ancient reli- gious ceremony; harder to spot what the German interest is, but perhaps they were the ones who insisted on an American star just in case.
Unfortunately, following in a time- honoured tradition, they picked the wrong American star. Christopher Walken, who usually plays thin-lipped ice-cool villains, is cast here as • brash American publishing hotshot Vanni Corso, and so waves his arms around and says 'schmuck' and 'ciao' and 'whole new ball-game' very loudly, just so the German co-producers will be able to differentiate the American star from the British nobodies. He doesn't look like a brash publishing hotshot; he looks like Christopher Walken having a good time acting badly, secure in the knowledge the film-makers can't tell anyway. In contrast, Jonathan Pryce, a blocked novelist, is dis- shevelled and distracted and seems vaguely ashamed to be in the picture at all. The camera pans slowly around him, as if the director's trying to catch his eye. Or maybe she's trying to get a better view of the back- ground locations, all of which are shot with a sleek surface gloss but nonetheless come straight from the top deck of the London Transport tour 'bus: Trafalgar Square, for romantic reunions; Harrods, for nocturnal backdrops; the Ritz, for lunch ... every
day. In this movie, the Ritz fulfills the same function as the Main Street diner in a one- horse town.
`Champagne! The best!' snaps Walken, and, amazingly, Mlle Bouquet's cheek- bones are impressed. Walken, she tells Pryce, is 'fabulous' in bed. Like a good writer, he deplores the cliché, though if he was that punctilious he'd have walked off the picture in Scene Three, somewhere between 'University of Life' and 'new kid on the block'. Still, she tries again: 'Very well. He's the Nijinsky of cunnilingus.' The dancer or the horse, you wonder. On bal- ance, probably the horse, since Walken's expertise demands a certain amount of time on all fours. Alas, you can take a horse toward her, but you can't make him drink. Soon, Walken is treating her as badly as Pryce. It's hard to stay interested in a romantic tussle between a philistine jerk and a pretentious jerk, and by now even the Bouquet cheekbones are begin- ning to lose their charm. In desperation, she shocks her husband by going to the Proms in a backless dress with plenty of buttock cleavage, revealing another pair of finely chiselled cheekbones. At last: rock bottom. The European Union wants to restrict 'foreign' films and promote 'Euro- pean' pictures. You might want to bear that in mind on 9 June.
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