funny thing about passion

A couple of nights ago we watched Ken Russell’s film, Crimes of Passion on DVD. It came out in 1984. Like all Russell’s films, it’s high-energy, anarchic at times, silly, shallow, funny and sometimes startling. It’s all about sex, with Kathleen Turner playing China Blue, a bewigged smart-mouthed prostitute who by day is a workaholic sportswear designer. Considering the content, the film’s rating – M, for low-level violence – is way off-beam. It contains quite a lot of nudity, and one scene, in which China Blue has a wild ride with a truncheon-wielding policeman client, would definitely push it up to an R in my generally libertarian judgement. Of course, with Russell, nothing is ever taken too seriously, which is presumably why he’s gotten away with it.
Insofar as there’s a plot, it’s about a private-detective-security guy caught in a loveless marriage who’s asked to tail Joanna Crane, that’s Kathleen Turner’s workaholic sportswear designer, because her boss suspects she’s secretly selling out his designs. Naturally he uncovers her undercover job and they get under the covers. The sex is fantastic and whammo, it’s Romeo and Juliet, or maybe Antony and Cleo.
Meanwhile China’s being stalked by a sex-obsessed godbotherer, played either by Norman bates or Anthony Perkins, who resorts to mayhem here and there and is finally run through by a silver vibrator. All in all, a lot of frenzy and sordidité, some funny if creaky lines, a few distracting videoclip-type visuals, and a musical score that got under my skin, because I was sure I recognised a classical refrain, though Rick Wakeman was the only name in the credits. We never find out why Joanna becomes China, nor for that matter why she becomes Joanna. There’s a touch of pathos in the failed husband-wife relationship, though it’s hard to feel too much sympathy with frigidity so blankly presented. There’s probably an affirmation-of-life attitude to sex operating here, but to channel it into the old all-or-nothing, virgin-whore dichotomy looks to me like a failure of imagination. It’s not a film that’ll stay with me, character-wise, I suspect.