Lust And Revenge

Paul Cox's films tend to artistic sentimentality and although this is a satire of the art world and New Age religion his trademark heavy-handedness in making his point is no less evident.

Chris Haywood plays the wealthy scion of a pharmaceuticals fortune who has commissioned a sculpture by a well-known artist (Victoria Eagger) as a tax write-off. His dippy daughter (Claudia Karvan) sets her cap at the artist's model (Nicholas Hope) who is having troubles with his uptight wife (Gosia Dobrowolska) who is caught up with a New Age religion.

A mechanical, wordy script by Cox and satirist John Clarke serves only to illustrate Cox's messages and the cast are not able to invest their characters with any life. The normally reliable Karvan is always watchable but never credible and what about Nicholas Hope's Karl-Heinz would attract her is not evident. Most of the other performances are equally wooden with the exception of Gosia Dobrowolska, although as she is an unlikeable character this doesn't help the entertainment factor.

Cox's artistic sensibility is decidedly classically modernist and the work being commissioned, a Renaissance-influenced figurative sculpture, references by art critic Max Gilles to Epstein and Lucien Freud aside, is hardly likely as the work of any supposed internationally "well-regarded" artist in the late 1990s. As is so often the case with Cox, the laboured seriousness with which he tackles his themes often pushes them into the territory of unintended comedy (Norman Kaye's woollen-headed Baba Charles is a case in point) and that is, tantalizing title aside, about the most one can expect to get out of this film.

 

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