Sean Young in Love Crimes (1992) in 1080hd

My notes from a previous edition:

Sean Young plays an ambitious, cold assistant DA in Atlanta. She is willing to do anything for her career. She is frustrated because some of her cases are thrown out because of improper police procedures so, in order to increase her conviction rate, she starts to tag along on important busts to make sure the police do everything by the book. But don't think she's hoping to advance based on performance alone. She's covering all the bases by sleeping with her boss, the DA. It's clear that she's not having that affair because she's in love, because she confesses in one scene that she doesn't like a man inside her, doesn't even like being touched, and has never had an orgasm. The audience is meant to deduce these points: (1) she's giving head to get ahead; (2) she's a smoldering cauldron of sexual frustration.

She becomes obsessed with the case of a serial sexual predator who seduces women by posing as a famous photographer. She would love to prosecute the man, but she isn't sure of his real identity, and can't get any of the victims to help in any way. It seems that the con man is quite charming, and has a gift for reading the secret insecurities and desires of his victims, and for choosing women who are particularly susceptible to his particular wiles. He has actually given the women a wish-fulfilling experience by sexually exploiting them, and he has left them too conflicted to testify.

She decides to take matters into her own hands. She eventually figures out his pattern and uses herself as bait. It works. She gets him to pick her up, and accompanies him to a hotel room, where she intends to arrest him as soon as he tries something more significant than impersonating a photographer. He, however, is no dummy. He senses that something is wrong, so he rifles through her purse while she is in the bathroom, identifies her, and skedaddles from the hotel immediately, repairing to his evil lair in the bayou.

You can probably figure out what comes next. She follows him into the bayou and eventually finds him. Now we have the meeting of a man who knows how to fulfill the unspoken desires of women and how to exploit their sexual insecurities, matched up with a woman who is filled with sexual confusion and unfullfilled desires. When she confronts him, intending to make an arrest, he asks, "Why are you REALLY here?"

Will she arrest him, or will she fall for him? Or is she a closeted lesbian, therefore immune to his charms?

I won't spoil it for you, but I will note that the ending is totally unsatisfying. Rumor has it that the producers hated the director's original ending so much that they just chopped it out and left things sort of in limbo.

This film isn't good at all, but it might have been because it has some real positives. The idea is intriguing, inspired by an actual case involving such a man who lured women by posing as photographer Richard Avedon. The lead actor is interesting as well. Patrick Bergin is quite effective as the predator who is simultaneously menacing and beguiling. He's sinister, yet charming. The film is really dragged down, however, by some bizarre monochromatic sequences that are supposed to be the memories and/or fantasies of the Sean Young character, and are supposed to show us why she is the way she is. The director's intentions were good here, in that she was trying for a deep character study, but the execution of the scenes is just awful. Some of the scenes seem to involve some childhood trauma, which is fairly straightforward, but other ones take place in some kind of alternate universe where she and the sexual predator become tender and passionate lovers. Those fantasy scenes are not only confusing, but they are clumsily inserted into the "real" action, and haphazardly edited. The "fantasy" sex scene between the prosecutor and the predator is actually more annoying than erotic. Perhaps that was meant to show that the prosecutor is so far lost in self-loathing that she won't even allow herself a pleasant fantasy, or perhaps it was just poorly conceived as erotica. Either way, it's unrewarding for the audience.

The film has one additional, and very significant, liability: Sean Young is no Meryl Streep. Her facial expressions, or lack thereof, make it difficult to figure out which emotions she is experiencing, and her line readings are nearly robotic. It's easy to understand why she was credible as an emotionless replicant in her greatest role.

IMDb viewers rate this a dismal 4.2, and that's probably fair, but I think you might be able to create a winner out of this concept if you remade it with a better presentation of the fantasies and flashbacks, and cast a competent, sexy actress in the female lead.

Darby Vasbinder in Beyond Dream's Door (1989) in 1080hd

Jessica Lange in King Kong

Selena Gomez