The Right Style For the Wrong Stuff

Philip Kaufman's Twisted plays like a bad movie on so many levels, one really needs to love film in order to see how good it also is. Its saving grace isn't camp (if that's what you're thinking), but a certain perversity of style that hooks the eyes while shielding the ears. In many ways, Twisted reminds me of those studio thrillers from the '40s and '50s in which boilerplate is creatively transformed through a director's personal touch. Though Sarah Thorp's screenplay is shit, it sets the stage upon which Kaufman and his cinematographer, Peter Deming, can dance.

The plot is a variation on the standard Ashley Judd thriller, in which a strong professional woman battles against male scum as well as her emotional softness toward said scum. This time around, Judd plays Jessica Shepard, a stiff-lipped San Francisco cop who is promoted to homicide detective after single-handedly capturing, cuffing, and assaulting a suspected serial rapist and murderer (Leland Orser). Her surrogate father and mentor, John Mills (Samuel L. Jackson), happens to be the Commissioner of Police and, in one scene, he slyly tutors Shepard on how to justify police brutality in our age of civil rights.

Kaufman then cuts to the prison where the skinny, boyish rapist speaks directly into the camera from his darkened cell. He wears a red prison jumpsuit and protectively hugs his knees. He earnestly and piteously pleads his innocence, claiming that Shepard had lured him with the promise of rough sex--that she had entrapped him, restrained him, then unjustly injured him. The soft rhythm of his voice, the hurried pitch of his breath, his lawyer's unctuous nods of understanding, and Kaufman's use of color and lighting all conspire to create one of the film's many moments of pure cinema.

Another delight are the actors, who make their familiar roles provocative. Judd's detective, for example, is a piece of work. With her dark hair styled boyishly short, she dresses in black, gaining physical and sexual presence through the way in which her clothes express her demeanor. Her character's disintegrative arc is nicely mirrored in the devolution and gradual introversion of her body language.

Shepard begins the film compactly and firmly. With her promotion, however, she becomes the only female homicide detective, and Kaufman staffs her division with tall, bulky actors. They don't take to her professionally and make a sport of viewing her sexually. In another perverse yet captivating scene, a fellow detective subtly harasses her while she works late at her desk. Dressed in a purple shirt and snug blue pants, he stands coiled over her chair. "I know one thing for sure," he purrs, "Every bone in your body wants to hit me now." He then lightly caresses her shoulder while exiting the frame.

Her first case happens to be the murder of someone with whom she once had sex. The same connection exists to her second case, as well as to her third. All the evidence points to her, of course, but Commissioner Mills intervenes and declares that so long as no material evidence links her to the murders, she and her partner (Andy Garcia) will remain on the case. When her superior (Russell Wong) requests information about the victims, her answers are short and vague. "Haven't you ever picked up a stranger in a bar and slept with her," she argues. "Only in my fantasy life," he sternly replies.

When not gallivanting in the arms and beds of strangers, she returns to her small apartment and drinks herself to tears, then sleep. Upon awakening from her blackouts, yet another former lover turns up dead. Since Shepard is such a deeply sad and troubled woman, one might wonder why her outward projection of bravura attracts as many men as it does. It must be so that she can utter the enticement, "Everyone who kisses me turns up dead."

There is a way to appreciate a film like this--the question is whether you care how. As Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep proved so long ago, the style of a thriller is often much more enjoyable than its content. In Twisted, the great Philip Kaufman (The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being) has delivered a film that resembles any number of bad studio productions, until one switches perspectives and realizes just how mesmerically well-directed it really is.