Ninety percent script (and ten percent clothes models out of a J. Crew catalogue), Steven Soderbergh's succès d'estime is no sort of triumph over its circumstances. It bears all the I.D. marks of a low-budget directorial debut. The sound is tinny and hollow. The lighting is blary. The image flow is sputtering. And the difficulty of fitting a 35mm camera into real locales is groaningly apparent in the proliferation of wide-angle shots and, even loudlier apparent, in a couple of high-angle, corner-of-the-room shots of the sort an undercover drug agent might select if he wanted to record a clandestine transaction between a nefarious Colombian and a U.S. Congressman. But what of the script? The romantic quadrangle at the heart of it is, for all its outward humanism, a highly hypothetical configuration that could never hold its shape, never have formed in the first place, outside the sterile laboratory of Soderbergh's mind. And the final twist of plot -- with its testament to the "curative" powers of the love of a "pure" (i.e., literally untouched) woman -- is the slushiest and soft-soapiest type of women's fiction. This one, of course, is the work of a man, but then so is the job of a gigolo. James Spader, Andie McDowell, Peter Gallagher, Laura San Giacomo. (1989) — Duncan Shepherd
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