Song of the Day: “Sway” – Dean Martin

Dangerous Beauty

Director: Marshall Herskovitz
Genre: Biography/Drama/Romance
Year: 1998

Thematically, this movie brings to the forefront the interesting dilema of arranged marriages. Set in 16th Venice, the film tells the story of Veronica Franco (Catherine McCormack) and Marco Venier (Rufus Sewell), a young couple who fall in love with each other but due to social status are unable to marry. At a time when marriages were made for convenience and the advancement of familial power, the two simply can not find the way to reconcile their differences…or rather, Marco doesn’t. Veronica, being pennyless, has absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain, Marco, being of a wealthy background feels the responsibility to marry within his status and preserve the power that his father is trying to look after.

Unfortunately, in her romantic way, Veronica sees this as weakness, or lack of love on the part of Marco and she proceeds to follow in her mother’s footsteps and become a courtesan, whom she is told are “some of the most educated women in the world.” In a ‘if you can not join them, beat them’ fashion, Veronica “empowers” herself by using her sexuality, to seduce men and make herself the most desired courtesan in Marco’s world, obviously sending him in a tail spin when Marco is brought into a marriage and he finds himself caught between the wife he was forced to take and the woman he loves, who is prostituting herself.

I perhaps would find this movie more appealing if I could find the way to reconcile prostitution with empowerment.  The argument here is that men used women like property and slept around behind their wives’ backs and thought nothing of it. The fact that Veronica achieves the same is not, at least to me, a sense of empowerment, but rather tells me that she sunk to their level, which I would see as the polar opposite.

Veronica’s rise to fame also happens early on in the movie and I find it unable to convince me. Through a montage that is mostly superficial we are told to believe that she has perfected herself. There is no trial and error here. It would appear, Veronica starts out hating it, then five minutes later, after some unspecified amount of time has passed (it does not feel like much), she is a polished seductress. There is no faltering, no evolution and as far as the character goes, no credibility. I would argue that giving us a girl that struggles to the post she eventually gains would allow us to appreciate her achievements, even if one disagreed with the morality behind it.

Be that as it may, this of course puts her in the mix of things, challenging her not only physically but mentally as well, except…it would appear that for the film maker a well educated woman is equal to a woman that knows poetry. And so, instead of showing us a knowledgeable woman able to stand on her own with her intellect, we are given a witty girl that can do what amounts to 16th century poetry freestyling, building in the process a poet enemy that comes back to haunt with a vengeance (expect an eye rolling, predictable, revelatory moment).

It is not a terrible movie, but it lacks a soul, and it floats on the surface, making a charge for the importance of carnal passion and discrediting the rest, including the Church which is quite obviously portrayed as heartless witch hunters and hypocrites, all of which leads to an over dramatic , predictable but crowd pleasing ending. Further more, even here the film fails to take its stand. Without giving much of the ending away and trying to avoid a spoiler, suffice it to say that these clearly abominable clergy become avatars. They are set up to be hateful, hypocritical, power mongers, a simple humiliation at the end of the movie is not enough to sell the point home. Perhaps it would have been more interesting if there had been real repercussions towards these two-faced men that clearly deserved some sort of retribution.

It is in the end, a Hollywood romance story and a period piece with no shining technical merit to speak off, but with enough entertainment value, pretty faces, naked flesh and soap-like dramatics to keep you awake. It is, if nothing else, the rosiest portrait of a prostitute you will likely watch, given that it deals with all the positives and opts to ignore the negative aspects of the trade, save for the obvious inconveniences of falling in love with the clients and such. I think this film sets out with high hopes, but falls well short of the mark, becoming in the process the equal to a good made for TV movie, but not much more than that; given the fact that it showed some serious potential, it is kind of a shame.

I would say, stick to Pride & Prejudice, which is a far better movie, technically superior and if it is the empowerment of women you want, Joe Wright achieves it in that film with greater humanity and believability, without the need of sex as a weapon.

Rating: 3 out of 5
Comments: Nudity, sexuality (non-explicit), adult themes.
Quote: Beatrice Venier: Do you know what my daughter’s nurse told her today? “In a girl’s voice lies temptation – a known fact. Eloquence in a woman means promiscuity. Promiscuity of the mind leads to promiscuity of the body.” She doesn’t believe it yet, but she will. She’ll grow up just like her mother. Marry, raise children and honor her family. Spend her youth in needlepoint and rue the day she was born a girl. And when she dies, she’ll wonder why she obeyed all the rules of God and Country for no biblical hell could ever be worse than a state of perpetual inconsequence.