Florida. Ned is a sloppy lawyer who loves sex. One night, he meets a woman outside, Matty. He meets her again in a bar, after which the two spend a passionate night in her mansion. She reveals to him she is married and persuades Ned to kill her rich husband. Ned kills him inside the mansion, and drags to an abandoned house just to set it on fire, to make it look like an accident. Matty changed the will so that she can inherit her late husband’s entire fortune. Ned is sent to jail, while Matty seemingly dies in an explosion at a boat house. Ned however obtains an old high school yearbook, where he finds out Matty actually had a different name, Mary Ann, and that she took the money and fled to an island.
The film debut of director Lawrence Kasdan, “Body Heat” is arguably his finest film, a modern distillation of the classic film noirs of the 40s and 50s. It has all the elements needed, except that they are more untrammeled in this edition: a man longs for sex; a seductive woman lassoes him in her spell; but then just uses him when she ever so mentions how her husband is “in the way”; until the man does the crime for her, even though she has ulterior motives. William Hurt and Kathleen Turner finely play these new incarnations through characters Ned and Matty, more or less: she is not that attractive, but he seems to be so desperate for sex he tricks himself into believing she is. When they meet in a bar, Ned’s passionate arousal is palpable in their dialogue: “Maybe you shouldn’t dress like that.” - “This is a blouse and a skirt. Don’t know what you’re talking about.” - “...I meant you shouldn’t wear that *body*.” In probably the movie's most famous sequence, after Matty escorts him out, Ned goes back to the front door, looks at her inside the mansion, takes a chair and throws it through the window (!) so that he can enter the mansion and passionately embrace Matty. The three erotic moments are rather timid, though, since not much is shown. In the above mentioned sequence, for instance, the couple has sex—in clothes. Likewise, in another, they are shown topless as they lay down in bed, just for the movie to cut to another sequence. This is PG erotic stuff. Kasdan has troubles with standard, conventional dialogues, a lukewarm execution at times, as well as a lack of a mood—"Blood Simple", for example, has a much more compelling atmosphere. He also needed more stand-out moments, since several of them are not memorable. However, Kasdan succeeds in creating a crime film reminiscent of Chabrol, whereas his plot twist at the end is remarkable, evident in the fact that it has been copied and imitated in hundreds of similar movies.
Grade:+++
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