Philip Haas' The Blood Oranges

* * (out of 4)

The Blood Oranges was somewhat unfairly squashed at the 1997 Toronto Film Festival, opening to disastrously poor reviews. While it is not as strong a piece as the other literary adaptations by Philip and Belinda Haas, namely, The Music of Chance and Angels & Insects, it was doomed to join an assortment of recent interesting failures which have gone straight to video.

The ferociously competitive theatrical market these days doesn’t allow certain innovative filmmakers the chance to find any sort of audience. Michael Almareyda’s cluttered but beautifully creepy mummy film Trance (released on video by Trimark as The Eternal) and Paul Auster’s challenging love story existing in a confusing world of dreams, Lulu on the Bridge, which at first seems to be a movie without a roadmap but turns into a compelling tale of one man’s personal journey to salvation, share with The Blood Oranges a rightful place as a film of promise, which deserves a look for patient viewers willing to see through the imperfections.

Such films are reminders that there is challenging work out there from filmmakers who, if given a chance, will build a strong body of work, and these films will be bookmarks in their careers to look back on and say that the inspiration for their future films could be found here. Alternately, if they’ve already made some terrific movies, as Philip and Belinda Haas have, one should give them a nod of encouragement for their work which does not entirely succeed, but at least tries to stretch the boundaries of filmmaking.

The Blood Oranges might, at first glance, seen to be merely high class erotica with a dash of art house snobbery. Indeed, the filmmakers rub our noses in the world of 70's free love, where the sex feels cheap and hypocritical under its glossy surface. There’s something vaguely silly and preposterous about the Bohemian couple at its center, Cyril (Charles Dance), a British dilettante, and Fiona (Sheryl Lee,) his boisterous and horny American wife. They live on a remote island, free from the trappings of yuppie sexual conventions, and invite into their “love lunch” a couple who have moved into the villa opposite theirs, the morose Hugh (Colin Lane) and his curious wife, Catherine (Laila Robins), who warily dips her foot into their sexual idyll.

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