Flawless
On one level Michael Radford’s Flawless has clearly been designed as a stylistic experiment. Not only does it take place during the 1960s, it looks and feels like a heist picture from the period. It resurrects a style of thriller long since abandoned for the genre’s more oppressive, cynical current form. The filmmaker renders the milieu without any of the irony or self-reflexivity usually attached to such deliberate retreads (i.e. Down with Love) and manages to tell an effectively wrought, deceptively subtle story in the process.
Demi Moore makes one of her periodic returns to acting as the stoic, social climbing Laura Quinn, the sole female executive at the London Diamond Corporation. Each day she studiously trudges through the Art Deco lobby and pink carpeted halls of the company headquarters, isolated from and viewed skeptically by her coworkers. Ultimately, the company decides to fire rather than promote her, despite her having coming up with a smart plan for attracting Soviet business. She learns the news from Mr. Hobbs (Michael Caine), a janitor in the building, who proposes that she assist in his plan to rob the company’s vault.
The picture marks a major departure for Radford, best known for the Academy Award-winning Il Postino and the recent version of The Merchant of Venice headlined by Al Pacino. Here, he’s produced a period piece of a different sort, one that brings to visceral life a specific moment in the histories of corporate culture and filmmaking itself. Working with cinematographer Richard Greatrex, the director generates intrigue within a world of big boardrooms, spacious offices and the shadowy corners and hidden spaces that surround them. The meticulous attention to detail not only shows in the camerawork – which frames the characters in such a way that their places within their larger social constructs become powerfully clear – but in Sophie Becher’s ornamental production design.
Edward Anderson’s screenplay leisurely proceeds through the thriller conventions and Radford directs with a hushed tone and noticeable restraint. Moore plays Laura smartly, emphasizing the insecurities and frustrations borne out of her knowledge that social circumstances have rendered the future out of her control. It’s a performance filled with internalized anger that nicely meshes with Caine’s, who gleefully assumes the role of puppet master, always one step ahead of his pursuers and Laura, his supposed partner in crime. Though Anderson orchestrates everything with moderation and largely refuses any bursts of melodrama, the film resonates with the complicated emotions generated by the main characters’ shared sense of insignificance within their top-down, power-heavy world.
Flawless might be too low-key for modern audiences but it marks a welcome return to a particular art, perfected by Hitchcock and others, of finding meaning and thematic weight beneath a conventional dramatic surface. It’s not exactly rife with suspense, certainly not qualifying as what Roger Ebert likes to call a “bruised forearm movie” and some of the central plot developments require major suspension of disbelief. However, as testament to the enduring quality of older permutations of a popular genre, and the possibility of their straightforward revival, it’s a work of great interest.
© 2008 Robert Levin. All rights reserved.
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