(2001) This film from writer/director Michael Cristofer - adapted from Cornell Woolrich's novel, Waltz into Darkness - is not a love story, Bonny Castle says, but a story about love.

In Santiago, Cuba, during the 1880s, expecting a kind, true, young woman, plain-looking but capable of bearing children, Luis Antonio Vargas (Antonio Banderas) awaits the arrival of his mail-order bride, Julia Russell (Angelina Jolie), coming from Wilmington, Delaware. Seeing instead a beautiful woman, not at all like the photograph he'd received, Luis accepts the deception with the explanation that she did not wish to be judged by a pretty portrait alone. He also admits to an evasion of not having truthfully represented himself as the wealthy owner of a coffee plantation. His "pretty bank account" presents no obstacle to her willingness to be matched: "We are both not to be trusted."

He says he wanted an American wife, representative of the future because Cuba is the past; she confesses having desired to escape the future. The day of her arrival is also her wedding day with celebration, but Luis - considerate, patient - does not rush her to consummate the marriage. Further differences in his expectations (e.g., unlike her letters, she says she enjoys coffee and other pleasures) Julia explains away by saying her modest sister wrote all of the correspondence. Once the couple engages in sexual congress, the intercourse of body language is explicit.

Hearing Luis proclaim himself "happily married," his partner Alan Jordan (Jack Thompson) says the expression is an oxymoron like "happily dead." Defining love as giving and then giving more while lust is taking and taking more, Alan asks which Luis is experiencing; both, replies Vargas, in that he's willing to give Julia everything and wanting to take everything from her.

At the theater behind the scenes of a play performed by a troupe of American actors, he catches a glimpse of her briefly consorting with Mephistopheles; later in the bedroom he notices a curious series of scars on her back; and she keeps the contents of her trunk locked from his view; he marvels at the absence of a conscience in her conduct: "You have no shame at all." Nevertheless, totally enthralled, he gives her free access to his bank accounts.

After a letter arrives from Julia's sister Emily, Luis urges her to reply; soon after a private investigator, Walter Downs (Thomas Jane), shows up, representing Emily's concerns. "What a mystery a happy marriage is," says Downs.

At intervals throughout the principal action, Bonny behind bars awaiting execution narrates her past to a meek young priest (allowing that "No one is innocent"), confessing Bonny to be afraid but not Julia.

Confronting Luis with the truth, Emily arrives with a charge of fraud against the woman pretending to be her sister; but Julia has already disappeared with everything - money and clothes - except the contents of the trunk, which are the real Julia Russell's things. "You've been married to a dream," his black servant Sara consoles: "a dream who stole your soul."

There are those who pay dearly for falling in love, and there are those who flee love because they're afraid or feel unworthy of love. Though the money's gone and love's ruined, "I want her back," Luis declares and asks Downs, who says he's searching for the real Julia, to help him find the liar, thief, and whore who was his Julia: "I want to kill her."

Together Downs - averring there's no such thing as love, just misguided feelings and emotions - and Vargas go to Havana during the Carnival festival where Luis finds Bonny in the company of Col Edwin North; the police are also pursuing her as a fugitive from justice. In Cardenas on the run with her, frantic, having decided to cast off everything for her, Luis exclaims, "I've just killed a man," to which Julia (as he continues to call her) replies: "I've just bought a hat." Looking at the situation with calm, practiced equanimity, she says in all practicality: "Something has to be done."

Following Bonny's accomplice Billy's surprising appearance, my interest in the cheap melodrama's direction, writhing and whirling, began to flag.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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