Defining disturbing behaviour is one of a film director's favourite things.
Colleen Murphy has joined the club with her movie Desire, a melodrama profiling Francis, a piano player (Zachary Bennett) who might be responsible for the whereabouts of a missing child.
We don't know at first if he is. But writer-director Murphy, (she made her directorial debut with Shoemaker) lets us know after a long and winding backgrounder.
The classically trained Francis is a lost soul, working off his frustrations at an airport lounge doing show tunes. He ignores the lounge manager's (Martin Donovan) come-ons as he beds female patrons, presumably because they ask him to.
He visits his domineering mother (Elizabeth Shepherd) and passive father (Victor Cowie) in a senior's home, but obviously Francis feels professionally inadequate and parentally unloved. Poor baby.
When Francis meets an elementary school teacher (Katja Riemann), they share a bed, and a few secrets, but mostly they are hopelessly lonely and hardly lustful.
What follows is the unravelling process as Francis makes the transition from sensible to irrational.
The teacher, from the same school as the missing girl, starts to suspect the worst. A private detective (Graham Greene) seemingly confirms it with some garble direct from psychology 101.
Soon, there is no doubt. Francis has episodes, you see.
He sometimes pounds out classical pieces at the lounge, at home and in a piano store. He gets anxious then impotent during sex. His hair gets messy.
So does Desire, which played the Toronto International Film Festival last fall.
Lots of awkward dialogue, feeble plot points and self-consciously derivative foreshadowing count as negatives.
They take away from an ominously effective conclusion.
So getting to the climax is the tough part, even with a solid Riemann (a star in Germany) as the lonely teacher.
She gives Desire a reality benchmark that eludes writer-director Murphy and to a lesser extent Bennett, who plays the psychotically bent Francis as if he has a mild personality disorder caused by parents who just don't understand.
(This film is rated R)
More Movie Reviews
