A motion picture reconstructs the infamous Profumo scandal in UK, 1963, concerning the adultery between John Profumo, the then Secretary of the State in War of Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government, and a 19-year-old erotic dancer Christine Keeler, whose corollary directly cripples the Conservative Party’s cachet and mostly accounts for its rout by the Labor Party in the 1964 general election.
Directed by a first-timer, the Scottish Michael Caton-Jones, SCANDAL swerves its focal point from Profumo (played by a phlegmatic McKellen sporting a goofy bald haircut) to Keeler (Whalley) and her confidant Stephan Ward (Hurt), a hedonistic osteopath who spots her in the club and invites her to live with him, introduces her to manifold male personage, and encourages her to never say “no” to a dare, and puzzlingly he never puts any action to copulate with her throughout the whole affair.
What is the quiddity of the relationship between Keeler and Ward? As on multiple occasions, Keeler refutes “I’m not a prostitute and Ward is not my pimp”, yet their intimate but perversely chaste co-dependence tickles our curiosity, for that matter, SCANDAL wades into a rarer stretch of waters, to dissect a mutual limerence between a man and woman, without letting their libido steal the limelight, maybe Ward is impotent, his Freudian satisfaction can only be quenched by grooming her into a worldly minx, yet that is anybody’s guess. By comparison, the Keeler Affair, Christine’s courtesan-like swinging between various parties, from Profumo to Eugene Ivanov (Krabbé), the Soviet spy, only reveals to be a side dish of dalliances, which makes the aftermath even more staggeringly stinging.
In the end of the day, it is Ward who sits in the defendant’s seat as the whipping boy after all his so-called friends uniformly leave him in the lurch as soon as the wind changes, Profumo remains scot-free after his resignation, Keeler’s court testimony has no weight with her naive affection, the merciless interpersonal betrayal acts as the last straw weighing down on Ward’s disillusion and world-weariness. If that is the tenor behind the whole project, the outcome is well produced.
Ribald in its imagery (as per the standard for a UK picture), but less confident in organizing a coherently sensuous exposé, SCANDAL feels leaden in the ambience and occasionally stilted in the unraveling (political agenda, upper crust depravity, is all scratched on the surface only), although the cast is more than average, Hurt is amiable in general but also can let up inner turbulence with expressions only; Bridget Fonda nails the British accent as a more men-savvy glamor puss who is craving for any chink of spotlight, and Whalley, the ex-Mrs. Val Kilmer, as alluring as she is, is visibly on the wrong side of 20, too sophisticated to pass for an ingénue who is clueless in placating her warring, jealous man friends, infantilized only for her sexual appeal, judging by that, SCANDAL’s saucy subject matter sorely needs a rejiggering.
referential entries: Steven Soderbergh’s SEX, LIES AND VIDEOTAPES (1989, 7.3/10); Neil Jordan’s MONA LISA (1986, 7.1/10).
