It’s really more a black comedy.
Bobby Grady (John Laughlin) is around 30. He lives the American Dream. He has a security business. He has a perfect wife, Amy (Annie Potts), and two great little kids. They live in a nice suburban house. Bobby has always been a straight arrow and it’s paid off. He played football in college. He married his high school sweetheart.
So why is he attending a group therapy session? He’s just there to support a buddy. Bobby doesn’t have any problems. And then he lets the mask skip. He and his perfect suburban wife no longer have perfect suburban sex. They no longer have sex at all.
Bobby has never been aware of it but he has been living a lie. He’s been wearing a mask of perfect middle-class happiness to cover up the fact that all the passion has long since departed from the marriage. He and Amy have been wearing masks. They have been playing a game of make-believe.
Then he takes a security assignment, to check out a woman named Joanna Crane (Kathleen Turner) suspected of industrial espionage. That’s how Bobby meets China Blue. China Blue is Joanna Crane. China Blue is her secret identity. Her mask. Or perhaps Joanna Crane is China Blue’s mask.
China Blue gives Bobby the best sex he has ever had in his life. That’s when Bobby realises how empty his life had become.
Bobby is not the only man obsessed with China Blue. There’s also the Reverend Peter Shayne (Anthony Perkins), a crazed preacher. Or perhaps just a crazy man who has convinced himself that he is a preacher. The Reverend’s mission is to save China Blue. He is a saviour, and possibly sees himself as an avenging angel. The Reverend is tortured by his sexual desires.
As I said, it’s a setup for a conventional erotic thriller but Ken Russell takes it in wild crazy directions.
Kathleen Turner and Anthony Perkins share top billing. Kathleen Turner is simply amazing.
China Blue is not just a mask won by Joanna. China Blue then plays various parts for various clients, depending on what she thinks will excite them. Sometimes she tells them stories of her past traumas that led her into a life of prostitution but her stories are pure invention.
All the characters are sheltering behind a mask of some kind, playing roles, and often there are masks on top of masks. When he takes the surveillance job Bobby dons another mask - the hardboiled private eye. He doesn’t do it convincingly (because he’s not a tough guy) but it’s telling that at a time when he feels powerless in his relationship he resorts to play-acting as a cynical tough guy. What he needs in his life is honesty, but that’s too scary.
My initial impression was that the Reverend was a character that just didn’t work and that the performance of Tony Perkins was more parody than anything else. In fact, had this been a straightforward erotic thriller this performance would have been enough to sink the movie. But this is a different kind of movie and in a way the character does work. We don’t have to believe in him.
We don’t have to believe that anything in this movie corresponds to real life. The look and tone of the movie suggest a fever dream, or even a twisted fairy tale. The Reverend is perhaps a fairy tale monster, or perhaps a nightmare conjured from the unconscious. There is even a slight hint of a comic-book feel (and the Reverend could certainly have been a comic-book villain).
It’s significant that Joanne’s house looks like a fairy-tale castle. She has constructed for herself a world of fantasies and make-believe. Perhaps her China Blue persona is her eroticised fantasy of being a fairy-tale princess.
And the suburban life of Bobby and his wife is their version of a perfect fairy-tale world but they’re miserable because they’re not really living happily ever after. The perfect love needed to sustain their fantasy has vanished. Their sex life has been built on lies because without the love they’ve just been going through the motions.
Like so many of Ken Russell’s movies it’s impossible to fully appreciate this film without taking into account that Russell was raised a Catholic. The movie is not just littered with religious iconography. Religious themes are all-pervasive. Russell belongs to the rich tradition of Catholic film-makers, a tradition that includes Lang and Hitchcock. It’s a tradition that is now a thing of the past, and cinema has as a result lost much of its power and magic.
The use of colour is absolutely extraordinary. On a limited budget Russell still manages to deliver a visual extravaganza. Dick Bush’s cinematography is superb.
Crimes of Passion has a quality I really really love in a movie - a sense that the story takes place in a world very much like the real world but there’s just something slightly off-kilter. This is hyper-reality or exaggerated or heightened reality. It’s almost, dare I say it, an anticipation of the David Lynch approach.
This is certainly not a movie that is anti-sex. There’s nothing wrong with Joanne’s taste for kinky sex, but it doesn’t satisfy her because she needs passion and love as well.
Crimes of Passion is one of Ken Russell’s best movies. Very highly recommended.
Arrow’s Blu-Ray offers both the unrated cut and the slightly raunchier director’s cut, with an audio commentary by scriptwriter Barry Sandler and the man himself, Ken Russell.
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