Wild Side

Although Donald Cammell's last film was released in 2000 it was actually made in 1995, Cammell commiting suicide in 1996 after the producers cut his original version, now presumably restored as the “directors cut”.

Cammell is best known as the writer and co-director of the cult film, Performance (1968). Wild Side is not going to change as it is fundamentally a poor relative, playing with similar themes of identity and polymorphous perversity but lacking the earlier film’s zeitgeist resonance and visual brio.

Anne Heche works in finance during the day and a call girl, Alex, by day. Thus she meets Christopher Walken’s big time money launderer, Bruno Buckingham, and Joan Chen is his almost-ex- wife. Lesser-known actor Steven Bauer is an undercover FBI agent masquerading as Walken's chauffeur who traps Alex in helping him take Bruno down.

There are two main reasons to watch Wild Side. One is a very sexy roll-in-the-hay between Heche and Chen. The other is the wonderfully over-the-top performance by Walken. Already well-known for such things, he shines here. Cammell falls foul of the usual trap for people with an appetite for excess (Cammell might have taken note of Ken Russell's career, one that he no doubt knew well) and that is how do you stop the bad overtaking the good? Eventually, of course, bad wins. Here the bad is that the characterisations are stereotypical and the story rather mechanically assembled. One can connect the dots but the result is not in itself engaging. Perhaps it was this rather than destructive editing that brought Cammell so low.

 

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