Cinema
French Kiss (`12', selected cinemas) Jade (`18', selected cinemas)
The waiting game
Mark Steyn
It's one of those virgin-and-whore weeks. In the red corner, Linda Fiorentino, the cool, loping, raven-haired femme fatale of The Last Seduction; in the fluffy pink cor- ner, Meg Ryan, cute-as-a-button blonde moptop from Sleepless in Seattle. Of course, nobody's really a virgin any more, at least not in films: even nice girls do it. But, if you're trying to position yourself as the Doris Day of the Nineties, it presents a few problems.
In a Doris Day soi-disant sex comedy, Doris's niceness is signalled by the lengths to which she'll go to avoid sex. Today, alas, that would mark her out as some sort of Christian fundamentalist whacko from the Southern virgin cult True Love Waits. So, 111 French Kiss, Meg Ryan's niceness is sig- nalled by the lengths to which she'll go to become Canadian. Obviously, the director Lawrence Kasdan didn't sit down and fig- ure out, `Ah-ha, the contemporary equiva- lent of sexual abstinence is Canadian citizenship,' but then he doesn't seem to have figured much else out, either. Still, the sub-text is clear. In a Doris Day film, Doris won't go all the way because she's waiting for Mister Right. Here, Meg has found Mister Right but she won't go all the way to Paris because she's waiting for her Canadian citizenship to come through. Somehow, that's not the same.
Anyway, when Timothy Hutton goes to France on business, Meg has to stay behind in Toronto. Next thing you know, Hutton's calling to say he won't be coming home because he's met this fantastic French chick. So Meg sets out to win back her beau from his Gallic temptress and hops on a plane, on which she meets Kevin Kline, Playing a Frenchman. Nobody can accuse Kasdan of typecasting: the only Frenchies In the film are the extras in the Cote d'Azure beach scenes but, as their breasts have all been shoehorned into bikini tops, they look like Miss America contestants.
And it has to be said that Kline makes a better Frenchman than Meg Ryan does a Canadian. He has a floppy moustache and he chain-smokes, neither of which he'd be allowed if he were playing any American this side of Wyatt Earp. His model seems to be Gerard Depardieu in Green Card, though he's aware of his ridiculousness in a way no French leading man would be: 'Ay erm un ass-heaule,' he tells Ryan. But this kind of romance should be light as a feather, and Kasdan's direction is as lumbering as Depardieu in waterlogged underwear. He plonks his principals down in Paris, and immediately sends Meg round to the Canadian Embassy for a long chat with an immigration officer about her resi- dency status. You keep waiting for the Jokes in this scene, but it just chugs on like a public information video about how to fill in a visa application. By now, you begin to notice another dif- ference: with Doris Day, the purely hypo- thetical sex always seemed worth waiting for; here, with Meg Ryan, you sort of get the feeling it would just be kinda dull. It says something for the film's sexlessness that, despite the title, Kasdan doesn't dare risk putting his star through anything like a French kiss. The best thing in the picture is Kline's charming rendition of `La Mer' over the end credits.
Linda Fiorentino is a tougher cookie. Her line on men was summed up in The Last Seduction when her boyfriend wants to know where he fits in to her plans. 'You're the designated fuck,' she says. He scampers after her. "'Designated fuck"? Do they have greeting cards for that?' It's Fiorenti- no's misfortune, in Jade, to fall in with screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, whose great contribution to motion picture history has been Sharon Stone crossing her legs reveal- ingly in Basic Instinct. Eszterhas only writes about sex, and he only writes about it like a show-off teenag- er inventing a masturbatory fantasy to send off to the letters page of an undiscriminat- ing porn mag. Thus, his women are mostly bisexual nymphomaniacs just gagging for it, etc. In The Last Seduction, the sex was an extension of Fiorentino's manipulation: she was thinking on her feet and on her back. In Jade, Eszterhas trades on her image and then pulls it out from under: Seduction allowed her to outfox the guys; here, her erotic adventuring just gets her into trouble and it takes the boys to rescue her from her (ho-hum) self-destructive sexuality. The film is seedy, full of empty style and clunky plot mechanics, and David Caruso's facial expressions behind the steering wheel in the runaway car sequence look like he's auditioning for the next Naked Gun.
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