Boxing Helena Movie Trailer. Surely you’ve heard about Jennifer Chambers Lynch’s “Boxing Helena” by now. It’s the film that made legal history when its prospective star, Kim Basinger, was held liable for having got cold feet. Speaking of feet, “Boxing Helena” is the one that sounds as if its story, about a surgeon who amputates the arms and legs of the woman he loves, could make Ms. Lynch’s father, David (“Blue Velvet”) Lynch, look like Norman Rockwell.
It’s also the film that threatens to give the concept of metaphor a bad name. In the hailstorm of publicity that surrounds the film’s opening, Ms. Lynch has been trying hard to leap past the lurid to the metaphorical as she explains what her film is about. Ignore the severed limbs, and this is a story about love and obsession. Or about darkest fantasy. Or about the impossibility of truly possessing anyone. Whatever.
As it turns out, Ms. Lynch has both talent and a point. Her film is by no means the gory, exploitative quasi-pornography that it sounds like from afar. Presented instead as a macabre modern fairy tale, and staged in unexpectedly discreet style (under the circumstances), her “Boxing Helena” is at least as hypnotically peculiar as it is perverse. Kinky? Very definitely, since the film’s emphasis is on erotic fascination and not on disfigurement. Contemptuous of women? Well, no. Even without her arms, the cruel, beautiful Helena (Sherilyn Fenn) manages to hold all the cards.
“Boxing Helena,” which is sardonic enough to open to the strains of “You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You,” introduces its protagonist, Dr. Nick Cavanaugh (Julian Sands), as a rich and unloved little boy. (Ms. Lynch does lose some ground by casting the role of Nick’s mother, whose neglectfulness is meant to explain some of her son’s subsequent strangeness, with an actress who looks like a Playboy bunny.)
Nick grows up, under the shadow of a Venus de Milo in the family mansion, to become an odd bird. A talented surgeon with an ardent girlfriend (Betsy Clark), he nonetheless trembles a lot and spends much of his time spying on the gorgeous Helena, with whom he once had a dismal date. Helena hates him, which is nothing special, since Helena seems to hate everyone.
Ms. Fenn, supremely voluptuous and commanding in this role, plays Helena as someone who makes the most of her sexual power. Casually insulting to her current lover (Bill Paxton), and much more directly nasty to poor, hopeless Nick, she’s the sort to make a drop-dead party entrance in a clingy black dress, then jump into a fountain just to make a splash. Nick, who has lured her to the party in question at his vast, empty house, pursues her pathetically. “What is it going to take,” she finally asks him, sneeringly, “for you to realize I don’t want anything to do with you?”
It takes a car accident to set in motion the events that make Helena Nick’s prisoner, as the plot (Ms. Lynch’s screenplay is written from a story by Philippe Caland) does what it can to make John Fowles’s novel “The Collector” look like a book about butterflies. Still, Ms. Lynch keeps her film’s bizarre elements under control, and sustains its darkly dreamlike manner. No visible bloodshed is involved in transforming Helena from a cursing, prop-throwing hellion to the enshrined beauty Nick thought he wanted her to be.
Worshiped by her jailor, and somehow not looking nearly as victimized as the characters in run-of-the-mill horror films, Helena becomes a guiding force in the transformation of shy, bloodless Nick into a more sexual being. That is not to say that the relationship between Nick and Helena has directly romantic overtones; it involves more voyeurism and verbal sparring than direct contact of any sort. Ultimately, Ms. Lynch has nowhere to take her erotic parable except to a dead end, but she makes the unfolding of the story a spooky, engrossing process. There’s a lot more emotion to Ms. Lynch’s work than there is to her father’s.
“Boxing Helena,” while not the work of a Girl Scout, could also not be mistaken for a film made by a man. Ms. Lynch’s sense of her heroine’s intrinsic power comes through very clearly, and Helena’s ordeal is not presented as an attack on that power; indeed, Helena’s experience plays more like an eerie fantasy than as anything involving real pain. Though this film is sure to make enemies, it is also guaranteed a cult following on the strength of Ms. Lynch’s odd but coherent imagination.
The set design of “Boxing Helena” gives it an added strangeness, particularly in its seductively Gothic-looking interiors. The film’s hermetic quality is most clearly present in the performance of Mr. Sands, an ordinarily wan, remote actor whose otherworldliness is exactly right for this curious role.
Boxing Helena (1993)
Directed by: Jennifer Lynch
Starring: Julian Sands, Sherilyn Fenn, Bill Paxton, Art Garfunkel, Betsy Clark, Kurtwood Smith, Nicolette Scorsese, Meg Register, Marla Levine, Kim Lentz
Screenplay by: Jennifer Lynch
Production Design by: Paul Huggins
Cinematography by: Bojan Bazelli, Frank Byers
Film Editing by: David Finfer
Set Decoration by: Sharon Braunstein
Art Direction by: Paul Huggins
Music by: Graeme Revell
MPAA Rating: R on appeal for two scenes of strong sexuality and language.
Distributed by: Orion Classics
Release Date: September 3, 1993
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