Exposure Reviews

Popular character actor Peter Coyote plays the unlikely hero of EXPOSURE, an uneven though suspenseful revenge melodrama with a high-art gloss. Based, in fact, on a novel entitled High Art by Rubem Fonseca, who also wrote the screenplay, this Rio de Janeiro-set thriller casts Coyote as Peter Mandrake, an art photographer whose images of the sordid side of Rio have made his books international bestsellers. However, we know he's in existential trouble from the opening voiceover in which he describes a personal malaise that keeps him in Rio even though he knows he should leave. Coming out after dark, Mandrake obsessively roams the streets, snapping roll after roll of found moments of random sex and violence. While on one of his raunchy rambles, he witnesses the theft of a briefcase and a knife fight in which the thief is killed by the victim. Mandrake then saves the victim's life when the thief's accomplice tries to stab him in the back. Mandrake later promises to help a friend, Gisela (Giulia Gam), a prostitute who wants to return a computer disk dropped by one of her customers, a drug kingpin. Afraid to meet with the kingpin herself, she asks Mandrake to accompany her. However, Gisela is killed before the meeting can be set up and the disk is stolen. Knowing the police won't help, Mandrake tries to track down the owner of the disk, assuming him to be Gisela's killer. The owner, convinced Mandrake has the disk, sends two goons who stab him and rape his girlfriend Marie (Amanda Pays). Rather than letting the matter drop, Mandrake seeks out the man whose life he saved, Hermes (Tcheky Karyo), a knife-wielding "perf-sev" (perforation and severing, as in arteries) specialist, to learn the killing art. At the end of a plot that gets more insanely complicated with every turn, and drawing in such characters as a giant hitman and a midget criminal entrepreneur, Mandrake reaches his showdown with Gisela's killer, who is also Hermes's mentor. Director Walter Salles, Jr. may have bitten off more than he could cinematically chew in setting out to examine the psychic disintegration of a man who abandons his usual observer role, getting involved to his own peril and the endangerment of even more innocent bystanders, like his girlfriend. In this, EXPOSURE recalls such films as THE CONVERSATION, CHINATOWN and Antonioni's BLOW-UP and THE PASSENGER, without offering anything significantly new, original or different. The film's pretensions to high art are gradually abandoned in favor of low thrills as the intricate, intriguing plot takes hold. However, once EXPOSURE shifts gears, the casting of Coyote becomes a problem--he comes to resemble a character that may actually have been more credibly played by Jean Claude Van Damme. As good as Coyote is as an actor, he's just too laid-back to be believable as a man of action consumed by revenge. Admittedly, he isn't much helped by the script, which brings in the knife-fighting angle early on, but mostly lets it drop until Coyote's final confrontation with the killer. As a result, we don't see Mandrake's training put into any meaningful practice until the film's climax, which strains credibility by suggesting that an untested novice fighter would best a seasoned killer without breaking too much of a sweat. Still, for all that, EXPOSURE just manages to stay on track with its colorfully effective supporting cast, a strong sense of menace, deftly handled suspense and, more than anything, by the potent sensuality of Rio and its surrounding environs, all beautifully and expressively photographed by Jose Roberto Eliezer. Succeeding as neither fish nor fowl in terms of its genres, EXPOSURE is nonetheless a surprisingly gripping, if flawed, hybrid that startles the senses even as it baffles the brain. (Violence, profanity, sexual situations, nudity.)