Going for an adult flick and finding names like Dennis Hopper (the bad guy in
Speed) and Amy Irving in the star cast is very, very rare - trust me. It puts
you in a totally different frame of mind and you expect some class in the movie.
And more often than not, you might even get it.
Joseph (Dennis Hopper) is a middle-aged small-town schoolteacher. He has a relationship with Rosalee (Amy Irving) who runs the school. Their marriage is something that people have been expecting for a long time. Enter Catherine (Amy Locane) who comes to study in the school. She is a 17-year-old bombshell and Joseph finds he can't keep his eyes, and hormones, off her.
This unwarranted attention does not escape young Catherine and it doesn't take her long to seduce him. He can't resist her charms and falls for her totally. Catherine's plays all the typical teenager-ish pranks on Joseph, like telling him that she's pregnant and riding her horse buck naked (calling herself Lady Godiva!). And though he finds it tough to cope with her devil-may-care attitude, he can't stop himself from continuing with the relationship. He becomes increasingly distanced from Rosalee, and keeps feeding on these newfound pleasures of youth.
As is expected, only when they are found out does Joseph realize the futility of what he had been doing. He quickly scampers back to Rosalee who understands and forgives him. Feminists might have a heart attack seeing the utter lack of depth in the story. Wonder whether the message going out to the audience intends to say "It's all right to have your pleasures along the way, you always get your ol' gal back anyway"!
Hopper comes up with an excellent performance, probably due to the considerable enjoyment of being at the receiving end of the script. There are some really explicit scenes and I don't think anyone in the theater left disappointed. Then again, that could also be due to the 5 minute XX segment that the projector guy squeezed in. Anyway, Amy Locane does brilliantly as a 17-year-old seductress, and she doesn't show any signs of hesitation at taking her clothes off, much to the delight of the audience. Quite an achievement, considering the number of times she had to do it. A surprise element is Nick Nolte's short appearance as Catherine's father.
An excellent watch, still, but how you wish that with such a strong crew the story
might actually have been something more than an excuse for exposure.