Cinema
Diabolique (18, selected cinemas)
Stone aging
Mark Steyn
Iwas chewing the fat with a waitress the other day, and the conversation fell to Sharon Stone. 'She's got a terrific body,' she said, 'for a woman her age.' Granted that my waitress pal was, oh, mid-twenties, the qualification was still unsettling. But Sharon Stone is pushing 40, and, Holly- wood being what it is, she'll need to find a new act pretty soon. She's always been something of an anachronism, a kind of trashy Grace Kelly — an ice-cool blonde but with a tongue to match. In Hitchcock's day, she would have been the victim. Instead, in contemporary thrillers, she's the psychoslut par excellence with a nice side- line in lesbian frissons. She can do this rou- tine standing on her head — or, indeed, standing on her head with her legs wrapped around cheesy old Michael Douglas. What no movie seems to allow her to show is the playful, funny side she lets loose on talk- show appearances.
So here she is again in Diabolique, taking the Simone Signoret role in Jeremiah Chechik's remake of Georges Clouzot's Fifties thriller. In deference to the film's French origins, we also get Isabelle Adjani, who has mastered a fine neutral American accent. It's a bit of a waste of time, sadly, as Miss Adjani runs around giving a parody of a silent movie performance, full of staring eyes and startled eyebrows and open mouths; appropriately enough, it's in monochrome — black hair, white face, black crucifix, white breasts, black pubes, etc. She plays Mia, a nervy ex-nun who's become the child bride of a bullying Penn- sylvania prep school headmaster (Chazz Palminteri). The unprincipled principal is having an affair with another teacher, Nicole (Miss Stone). There's also one of those Hitchcockian devices so memorably spoofed by Mel Brooks in High Anxiety: Mia has a weak heart, which makes her liable to coronary attacks at moments of high anxiety.
As the film opens, wife and mistress are already teaming up to kill their mutual tor- mentor — Mia because she's being abused, Nicole because ... well, for no very good reason other than that she's been passed over for a promotion. In a thriller, when two people commit a murder, one is always cool and controlled, the other increasingly jittery and unstable. After the victim's corpse goes missing, Mia starts to crack and give the game away, attracting the attention of a nosy detective. In the French version, this part was played by Charles Vanel, in a double-breasted suit. Here, it's played by Kathy Bates, with a single breast. Her mastectomy sticks out, so to speak: it's one of the remake's few contemporary touches, prompting Miss Stone to make bitchy cracks about how come she doesn't get a prosthesis, but it only reminds you of how uneasily the rest of the story updates to the Nineties.
At one point in the film, a channel-surf- ing couch potato comes across Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? flickering away in black-and-white and pauses briefly in mid- zap: 'I'm waitin' till this is in colour.' Pre- sumably, that's a post-modem jest. Diabolique has been entirely shot in Tech- noBeige, except for Miss Stone, who preens and jiggles in red toreador pants and leopardskin prints. Chechik has fool- ishly decided to make her period charm explicit, dressing her in boxy little Fifties suits, with breasts straining against Lana Turner sweaters. Like Crawford or Stan- wyck, she's rarely without a cigarette, though these days a once routine prop has to be converted to full lethal weapon sta- tus. 'Second-hand smoke does kill too, you know,' whinges a fellow teacher. 'Not reli- ably,' sneers Stone, exhaling all over his face.
It's fun to watch. A camera team is at the school to make a promotional video and, over dinner, raises the possibility of filming the domestic staff: 'We really want to shoot the kitchen work crew,' ventures the direc- tor. 'Yeah, take a number,' says Stone, handing back her untouched meal. When she's not shrugging off sour ripostes or looking irredeemably cheesed off, she's dragging on another cigarette, each deep inhalation rippling down her sweaters and stretch pants like a minor earth tremor. It is, in its way, a magnificent performance, but, as with those Forties femmes fatales, it trembles on the brink of camp and, hope- lessly beached in a bad adaptation full of gothic clichfs, eventually falls right in. I'm as fond of lipstick lesbianism as the next guy, but this time even the obligatory Sap- phic tease scene where Miss Stone starts a- 'Honestly, there were four & twenty in the picture on the box lid!' kissin' and caressin' Miss Adjani failed to raise the spirits. Career-wise, Sharon Stone is beginning to look like one long good bi-.
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