Sex and Justice (Short)
Provocative title. Intriguing idea. The execution- gets better as it goes along.
That last part’s not exactly the best thing to be said about any film- let alone one that’s 45 minutes long. But writer/director Michael DiBiasio has a good idea going for a murder/mystery/conspiracy thriller here that takes place predominantly in an interrogation room, doesn’t have a frame of violence or sex, but does set a moral trap where the two ideas in the title are intertwined in surprising ways.
The story is simple enough. A pair of police detectives- Bryant (John-Patrick Driscoll) and Montgomery (Jonathan Patton) have brought in a woman (Rebecca De Ornelas, who co-produced the film with DiBiasio) who’s confessed to murdering a very important businessman. As the pair await District Attorney Turner (Richard Brundage), who will be interrogating the lovely and seductive Elizabeth Fiara, we find out that Turner has just been acquitted on perjury charges in the trial of an associate charged with murdering a prostitute. As a result, Montgomery must stay in the room with Turner as he interrogates Fiara. But as you might suspect, some things get revealed during the interrogation that turn the tables in both cases.
It’s not hard to see the tone DiBiasio is going for- the sharp cinematography gives us a sense of things and feelings beyond what’s in the frame, the cops speak in that hard boiled tone of film noirs’ past (Brundage’s Turner in particular has studied the beats, but the rhythms are anything but genuine a lot of the time), and Fiara (as played by De Ornelas) is clearly a student from the school of film femme fatales like Sharon Stone in “Basic Instinct” and Kathleen Turner in “Body Heat.” Good company to be in, but the result feels artificial and, well, acted, with none of the fluidity and naturalism this type of dialogue requires to pull in an audience. But when the story takes its’ left-hand turns (even though some of the performances show their smarts a bit obviously), the story becomes an interesting take on taking justice into one’s own hands. I’ll admit I didn’t really see it coming. That doesn’t mean the film completely takes you by surprising- just watching the actors go through the motions of noir, you know something’s up…even if as the credits roll, you’re still in the process of figuring it out.
