Desejo Selvagem

Could this be by the same director as Don't Look Now or Bad Timing? Poorly

acted, clunkily edited. You only have to compare the various accident scenes in this with similar ones in Don't Look Now to see how much Roeg has lost his

touch.

Even the generally reliable Teresa Russell (looking a bit chunky these days, I'm afraid to report) cannot save this one. The plot is pure pseudo-religious hokum, the acting is wooden and Roeg's attempts at his trademark dislocation of time are pitiful.

Avoid this one like the plague.

Marie Davenport is an unfaithful wife who plans to tell her surgeon husband Alex that she is going to leave him for her lover Dr. Daniel Corvin. However strangely enough, her husband is conveniently killed in a boating accident. Then his body disappears from the morgue, and this is when plenty of unusual occurrences start to interrupt Marie's life.

Every time I watch a Nicolas Roeg, I always find it hard to put it into words. "Cold Heaven" falls somewhere in the latter end of his work, but still it manages to hold your attention because of its unusually haunting and broad ambiance. The unique handling of the metaphoric premise (lifted off Brian Moore's novel) seems to shift back and forth amongst many different moody fields (thriller, supernatural) to eventually play out like a spiritual journey of religious faith, guilt, fate, and redemption. Everything about it works off one's emotions and seldom thoughts, which go on to feel like a ponderously obsessive dream full of miracles. What starts off like torment due to infidelity can suddenly turn into relief, and it shows love doesn't have any boundaries. What seems like an enigmatic and fractured structure to begin with eventually is answered. But I was less impressed and satisfied with the revelation, and the final 10 minutes or so.

Roeg's sensual visual style and steady pace has a sterile, but brooding air that seductively pulls you in. His filming techniques like crosscutting editing of the surreal flashbacks and visions can get jaded, but only adds the blurry nature of what to believe. Even the monologues of Russell's character's inner thoughts are well done and at times can really alienate. Dim composition, shading and lighting is pulled of admirably well in displaying a darkly stark atmosphere. The set pieces provide symbolic traits and within the beautiful images are also eerie currents. The exquisite and ever-changing backdrop that's on show is handsomely framed by Francis Kenny's glossy photography. Stanley Myers' bold music score is a oddly lingering mixture of spicy and light n' breezy cues. The performances are strikingly inspired. Theresa Russell is amazing in a very demanding multi-facet role. Mark Harmon and James are equally fine with complex portrayals. There's also highly capable support in the likes of Will Patton, Julie Carmen, Talia Shire and Seymour Cassel.

Not one of his greatest, but an interestingly flawed piece nonetheless.

Its cinematic treatment of the dead coming to life is the most interesting take I've seen on the genre. He is like coming apart at the seams. Its job is to cast a spell around the rest of the movie. This is the stuff of high theater. It is both literal and symbolic at once, a very Japanese treatment. Every time I remembered it from my first viewing it was just that guy's portrayal of the undead.

Somebody said it's like a soap opera performance, but this is exactly it. He is performing a soap opera character except vomiting blood, hurling, and having Frankenstein meltdowns. Instead of using soap as a pejorative, we can say it is a high art treatment of a soap. But the average viewer might not realize it, somehow this might play straight to them.

There is something about the contrast of the cable TV movie, with a Nic Roeg film, that is both jarring and weird, but never operating outside the viewer and the screen.

The climax of the movie is a cross being burned into the hill by God, then she runs in his arms, the saxophone plays. The film is about her thoughts of infidelity haunting her, and her returning to live in service to God.

I was not sure if she would run into the lovers arm because that would be a valid reading of the film as well. To forget her husband, he was dead all along, to move on. It would be a tale of sexual healing and grief. But Roeg had made that film several times by that point. Instead, to elevate such a small human dilemma to the grandest stage is the power of melodrama, the power of art.

Some of the early Peter Weir films dealt with white guilt and aboriginal spirituality with some of these tones. Another review said with auteurs we don't watch their filmography expecting them to top themselves, we go for the small pleasure of how they have twisted the dial slightly differently. All that is interesting in his films are here, although it does a disservice to put them into words. So a Christian work is unexpected, but using his avant-garde eye becomes a spontaneous combustion; it is impossible to go wrong dealing with the very symbols of reality, life, death, love, morality.

The lightning bolt awakening becomes something in films; that enlightenment isn't just about that, but about the inverse, a complete intolerance toward immorality. This is why her awakening is triumphant. It brought him back, finally, for real. Roeg was the rarest thing, a western auteur, uncompromising and without commercial interests. But this, his most obscure work is somehow his most directly meaningful, but at the same time you sense that having such direct answers is kind of a problem for him.

I fear that with this movie and the stultifying Two Deaths, that Roeg has slipped semi-comatose into semi-retirement.I just hope that he can produce one final great classic that will sit alongside, Bad Timing, Performance, Eureka,Walkabout and The Man Who Fell To Earth in his mighty cannon.

This movie almost plays better in you mind, in retrospect. It tackles several complex themes, which it then twists and entwines. The results, while not always successfully resolved, none the less provide something rare today; Food for thought. Among other things, this film deals with, adultery, faith, and redemption. Beautifully filmed, we are introduced to a wife of a doctor, whose flirtations are actually killing her husband. The wife is a non believer, yet she somehow finds herself involved in something that she cannot explain. She is both a unwitting pawn, in a miraculous event, that tests the faith of a minister and a Nun, and challenges her to examine her own disillusion with her marriage and her husband. She comes to realize that her outside affair with a handsome young man, directly affects the health of her husband, (who comes back from the dead.!) she is confused. And then there are those visions of the virgin Mary....Not your usual shoot em up..... oddly paced, yet affecting.