Ivan Passer’s Crime and Passion shares some distinct
similarities with his following film Silver Bears -they're both set in the world
of European finance, with a risk-taking protagonist facing off against better
equipped forces, sharing a pragmatic view of sexual relations. It would be
tempting to say that Silver Bears, a far more conventionally unified and
easy-to-take entertainment, represents “getting it right,” casting Crime and
Passion as something of a failed dry run. But the film’s failure is rather sadder
than that, for its hints of a darker, more transgressive vision that just got
away. It’s evident at the start, depicting how Omar Sharif’s financier protagonist,
Andre Ferren, is sexually excited (to the point of utter recklessness) at the prospect
of financial disgrace, shortly afterwards conniving with his girlfriend and
co-worker (Karen Black) to have her marry their richest client, for which they
fatten her up on pastries to make her more to the client’s liking. But from the
outset, the premise never bites as it should, not helped by the casting, or by
the constant sense of being marooned in unproductively pretty settings. Actually,
large parts of the film – such as Ferren narrowly escaping from improbable
assassins including a man on skis and an overweight masseuse, or the later goings
on in a supposedly haunted castle – bring to mind the second-wave Pink
Panther films of the same period, although its interest in obsessive
surveillance and voyeurism connects more deeply, and the ending – in which the
characters nihilistically submit to desire but then are saved through a
chilling twist of fate – evokes what might have been. Passer presumably intended
his film to be more fully defined by a sense of risk and freedom, of
psychologically and narratively living on the edge, and as such its failure at
least somewhat reflects Ferren’s likely nightmare, the bankrupting results of cravenly
hedging one’s bets.
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