Love Crimes

There's maybe one-third of a stupendous movie here, another one-third that's just plain dumb and another one-third that's simply abominable. The first half-hour delivers a setup that's smart, intriguing, unusual and challenging. It gives you little reason to suspect that before it's through, the movie will crashland quite as spectacularly and as totally as it does. Feminist agendas and the unspooling of dominant ideology have always been key elements in the work of director Lizzie Borden (Born in Flames, Working Girls). In Love Crimes, Young plays a highly effective assistant district attorney in Atlanta, who's somewhat repressed and work-obsessed. Some “grey area” crimes (based on actual occurrences) come to her attention in which a con man (Bergin) posing as famous photographer David Hamilton, seduces plain-looking women, takes erotic photographs of them doing things they ordinarily wouldn't do and then disappears. The women all have different reactions to the experience: some are angry, some are still basking in the happy glow of women with low self-esteem made to feel beautiful enough to pose for a fashion photographer, some feel humiliated and others simply don't what know what to feel. And though Bergin's actions are becoming gradually more violent, it is unclear whether his essential act of obtaining sex through deception is technically a crime. So after Young's boss (who is also her lover) orders her off the case, Young decides to throw all caution to the wind and goes after this photographer creep herself. And that's where the whole story starts to crumble. She goes down to Savannah to hunt her prey and embarks on a path marked by one stupid move following another. The smart legal mind we remember from the beginning of the film simply vanishes and we're left with a character who does things so stupid that the whole audience groans in unison, “Don't go into the woods,” or “Don't leave the engine running,” et cetera, et cetera. Then we move from the dumb stuff to the thoroughly incoherent. Something must have gone terribly wrong in the filming and pre-production stages because scenes simply don't cut together. There's continuity gaps and basic logical flaws all over the place that render parts of Love Crimes virtually inscrutable. And it's really too bad, because the mess forever buries that one-third of the movie that's intellectually stimulating and engagingly feminist and dramatically unorthodox, as well as ensuring that it will be a very long time before Borden is given another shot at a commercial project.