Dangerous Beauty Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)October 8th, 1999
PLANET SICK-BOY: http://www.sick-boy.com
Poor Veronica. She’s in love with the wealthy Senator, Marco Venier. But because of that pesky caste system, it is impossible for them to marry. So Veronica does the next logical thing. She becomes a courtesan.
Such is the allegedly true story behind Dangerous Beauty, a beautiful yet unintentionally hilarious look at high-class whores in 1583 Venice. Catherine McCormack (Braveheart) is Veronica, the milky-breasted hottie with hair of spun copper who falls for her unobtainable hunk, the bug/lazy-eyed nobleman played by Rufus Sewell (Dark City). Luckily, they live in a time when mistresses are pretty much acceptable.
Veronica’s Mom (Jacqueline Bisset), a former courtesan (as was her Mother), shows her future-slut-of-a-daughter the hooking ropes. She starts slowly, teaching Veronica how to properly eat and drink like a seductive concubine and then quickly builds up to the proper technique for “man-handling” the johns.
Showing little remorse or inhibition in her new profession, Veronica eagerly pleases her first lay and quickly becomes the most popular trollop in all of Venice. She also possesses a unique flare for poetry, which strangely makes the guys want her even more. Early on, the city is sent in to a tizzy by a very public and very silly sword and pen fight between Veronica and Maffio Venier (Oliver Platt, A Time to Kill), a friend of Marco.
When the Venetian warmongers turn to France for help in the impending war over Cypress, the visiting horndog King Henry takes immediate notice of Veronica and makes it clear that if she pleases him, he will lend his ships for battle. Now this King Henry is twice the man of both faggy Prince Edward from Braveheart and the upcoming limp-wristed King Louis in The Man in the Iron Mask. Our Veronica shags him so well that he commits most of his fleet.
So far, so good, but the story takes an idiotic twist involving the plague and the religious right. See, the church blames the plague on the courtesans and, even though she curled the toes of the King of France for her fair city, Veronica is deemed deserving of death for being a dirty stinking harlot. There is a big dumb Holy Inquisition scene that borders on being wildly ridiculous.
I expected a more depressing ending from director Marshall Herskovitz and producer Edward Zwick, the gloomy minds behind the quality television tear-jerkers thirtysomething, My So Called Life and relativity and, more dramatically, Legends of the Fall. Herskovitz and cinematographer Bojan Bazelli (Kalifornia) craft pictures of an astonishingly dazzling quality. The soft warm lighting brings to mind the works of Emmanuel Lubezki (Like Water for Chocolate), Darius Khondji (Stealing Beauty) and maybe even the Vaseline-coated photography of Gerald Perry Finnerman (Moonlighting).
McCormack is thoroughly mesmerizing as Veronica, blending the tantalizing qualities of both the Virgin Mother and Mary Magdalene simultaneously. She also resembles former Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Paulina Porizkova. Her beauty was obviously played down in Braveheart as her acting skills were in Loaded. Sewell is merely adequate in his role, although the sex scene between the two is one of the hottest screen spectacles since Broken English.
Dangerous Beauty could have been a much better movie if it didn’t take the ugly turn towards Demi Moore’s The Scarlet Letter. But, I guess when you’re filming a true story, you don’t have too many options to liven things up. And, in this case, that’s just too bad.
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
