Flawless
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by M. Faust
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Jules Dassin, the blacklisted leftist American filmmaker who passed away overseas recently, directed what has long been widely regarded as the archetypal heist movie, Rififi, in Paris in 1955. It’s got one of the truly bravura displays of technique in popular-film history: The more-than-20-minute long, dialogue-free portrayal of the robbery of a French jewelry store. This extended sequence has often been described as an example of “pure cinema,” and while purity and cinema seem unlikely bedfellows to me, there’s no gainsaying Dassin’s pulsing, tensely economical achievement in it.
Michael Radford’s Flawless is certainly a heist movie, but he and his collaborators also have at least a couple of other things on their minds. There’s nothing “pure” about their movie.
Watch the trailer for "Flawless"
Demi Moore in Flawless
Demi Moore is Laura Quinn, a 38-year-old expat executive at a London, England diamond wholesaler, a giant in the industry. When she’s passed over for elevation to a managing directorship for the sixth time, apparently because she’s a woman, and she learns she’s facing what the English call redundancy, she falls in league with a strangely shrewd, personally mysterious building custodian (Michael Caine), agreeing to be part of his diamond robbery scheme. And as the scheme advances, she realizes she’s part of something bigger and more dangerous too.
Obviously enough, the filmmakers meant to enrich their effort with more than suspenseful plot turns and mechanics. That is, they’ve provided two or three philosophical gestures, as well. Their movie is framed by an unconvincing flashback from the present in an attempt to emphasize its feminist slant, for example.
But writer Edward A. Anderson seems to have had difficulty welding the ideas onto a crime melodrama, and Radford’s direction is more efficient than involving.
Moore and Caine aren’t given quite enough opportunity to develop a chemistry. He showed up with his reliably smooth and clever performance game, but sometimes the movie falters when he’s not around.
Flawless has its tense moments, and it evidences an admirable seriousness, but you may find yourself wishing it was a little more tautly reminiscent of Dassin’s old film.
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