Every so often I will see a film in which an interesting story is derailed by an appearance, midway or later in the film, of a plotline that is wildly out of synch with what has gone before. This occurs most often in the genre of films known as erotic thrillers. The way it manifests there is, the bulk of the movie consists of character engaging in sex games of the boom-chika-wow-wow variety, then suddenly the director seems to remember this is an erotic thriller, not porn, so there has to be a story, and suddenly someone is being shot or kidnapped or arrested, which is completely out of synch with the sexy reverie that is the rest of the film.
It also mainfests in more mainstream films, I’ll use “Birthday Girl” as an example. In it, Nicole Kidman is a Russian mail order bride who is ordered over by Ben Chaplin, playing a shy bank employee of some kind in England who can’t seem to hook up locally. Kidman’s character can’t speak English and she’s kind of out of touch when she gets to Chaplin’s very nice house. Once she’s been there a couple of days, she gets a clue as to why Chaplin is not fishing in local waters for brides, she finds a stash of bondage magazines (lets say this is set in the 1980s when such things still existed).
Kidman confronts Chaplin with her new knowledge by banging down the stack of bondage mags on his dinner table while he’s sitting there eating. Later she invites him to have the sex of his dreams by tying her wrists together and staring at him meaningfully.
It’s an interesting story: will these two be able to have a meaningful relationship? What does Kidman’s character think: presumably there is a reason she decided to become a mail order bride to anybody with the cash to fly her out of Russia. Is Chaplin’s character able to relate to Kidman’s? I mean, the fact that he went for a mail order bride seems to imply some difficulty with relating to women. It would make for an interesting movie … if the story had been allowed to unfold.
Instead, we discover that Kidman’s Russian gangster boyfriend and his gangster pals have followed her to England, and the story quickly devolves into a standard suspense flick with the Russian gangsters planning to use Chaplin to rob the bank he works for. In short, it gets very boring, very fast, because of the Lurking Heavy Plot that kinda crushes the relationship like a bowling ball landing on a flower.
I was wondering if others have encountered this sort of thing, and found it bothersome, or have I just watched too many erotic thrillers?
The Will Smith “alcoholic super hero” movie, Hancock started good, but went off the rails and never recovered when the “real” plot was revealed. I’d put it in a spoiler box, but I can’t even describe what’s going on.
IIRC, there really was no budding romance in Birthday Girl because Kidman’s character was in on it from the start. It was more like a slow con movie, then a plot switch…
This does happen a lot in movies because something NEEDS to happen. Sometimes you can go a long with it…and sometimes it just completely throws you out of the movie.
Star Wars does this. It starts out interestingly enough with two simultaneous plot lines.
A.) a romantic comedy as old as stories themselves. Boy chases girl, boy catches girl, boy blows up girl’s planet. Will Leia fall for the tall dark stranger who rocked her world (literally), or will she play hard to get?
B.) A story of surviving in the dust bowl reminiscent of The Grapes of Wrath. We follow the trials of Owen and his wife carving a hard won a living out of the unforgiving soil while simultaneously raising a special needs child. A family who wanted a son so badly that they adopted a girl and raised her as a boy. Will Owen bring in enough bales of moisture to pay off the bank loan? Will the couple tell Luke why “he” is menstruating?
But then Luke sees a blue Princess in the family’s espresso machine and the movie goes downhill from there.
It didn’t make any fucking sense, even what little that did required clunky, rhythm-crashing exposition, and it changed the entire tenor of the movie. It felt like one of those campfire story games where people tell a story, then someone else picks it up after ten minutes. There was no returning to the original story, as if it didn’t exist.
The problem wasn’t that they were pseudo-angels. (well, not much) The problem was it was a movie about How Super-Will-Smith Learned to Stop Being an Asshole and Became a Hero and turned into Bad-Anime-Esque Backstory Dump And Racisim Is Bad And Also Superheroes Can’t Have Good Sex Because.
You can do a shift like that if the post shift is as interesting, or more interesting, than the pre-shift story. In this case, it wasn’t.
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For an example of this done well, see Berserk. Trigger warnings. (ANY triggers. No, really, I mean it)
Hmm. Looking at TV Tropes, I would say that it’s a ReverseRomantic Plot Tumor. In Romantic Plot Tumor the writer gets so into the romance that he kinda forgets that there’s a compelling mainline plot that needs to be told. Perhaps Birthday Girl is a form of that, though I didn’t find the bank robbery story all that compelling. In fact, I found it kind of flat. I would have dumped the bank robbery story and had more fun with the romantic leads.
I prefer to see it as a flawed romance rather than a flawed bank robbery story, but there’s probably room for argument there.
As for Kidman’s character, well, whether she was in on it from the beginning, it was hard to tell. Not speaking English, you don’t get much feel for what she is thinking in the first part of the movie. I was hoping for her to open up and her feelings, whatever they were, become more apparent. Would have been interesting, rather than the mundane bank robbery.
Oh, some other examples from the more erotic end of the erotic thriller spectrum: “I Like to Play Games Too” in which a sexy ad agency owner will only work for clients so long as they can match her at the sex games she enjoys (think the movie – not the book – 91/2 Weeks). In the last minutes the sex games end in an abrupt shoot out between two of her play partners, the good guy winning of course. Totally out of left field.
In Erotic Boundaries a yuppie couple’s marriage is strained when the hubbie’s hot secretary starts putting the bom chika wow wow moves on him, and the wife meets her old college “friend” … apparently wifey was lesbian until graduation, but her friend is still very bisexual, and the two of them start to pick up their old relationship. What will happen, other than lots and lots of people having sex? Well, it all ends in a massive police arrest of everyone who is not the young couple, because they were involved in a sex club that was a cover for a blackmail scheme. There was a LITTLE foreshadowing, but not much, and it came from out of left field.
In both films it kinda felt like the directors said, “Well, hey, we got 75 minutes of sex on film, let’s crank up the plot and finish this thing!” Which may well be the truth.
I think it was pretty clear she was in on it, because it is later revealed that she spoke perfect English. “Are you a giraffe?”
It probably would have made an interesting story if she wasn’t, or if the story had continued after they escaped to Russia…(One wonders how a fugitive bank clerk was going to survive there…)