MOVIE REVIEWS : ‘BERLIN AFFAIR’ A MELODRAMATIC MESS

Watching “The Berlin Affair” (selected theaters) is like witnessing a spectacular, 31st-story suicide attempt. While the spectacle has a morbid fascination, the end result is bound to be disastrous.

By all rights, this new film by Italian director Liliana Cavani (best known here for her low-camp sexcapade “The Night Porter”) should’ve had some of the same creepy magnetism. Instead, it’s more like second-rate Ken Russell, undermined by limp direction, a wealth of terrible performances and some incredibly soggy storytelling. Set in 1930s Nazi Germany, it chronicles the amorous adventures of Louise (Gudrun Landgrebe), the wife of an ambitious German diplomat, and Mitsuko (Mio Takaki), the lovely daughter of the Japanese ambassador.

But wait--the women’s sizzling affair is just the beginning. When Louise’s jealous husband (Kevin McNally) learns of this entanglement, all that erotic intrigue goes to his head too. Before long, he’s also enraptured by Mitsuko, an intoxicating creature and an accomplished sexual sorceress. Throw in a blackmailing art instructor, a suspected homosexual military leader, mysterious sleeping potions, faked suicides and a Nazi campaign to cleanse the Reich of immoral behavior--and, before you know it, this seamy fantasy has rocketed off into the sexual stratosphere.

You almost wish that Max Ophuls were still around to chronicle the story’s tortuous twists and turns. Unfortunately, with co-writer Cavani as director, the picture never really builds up a libidinous head of steam. In fact, it’s a shambles. Cavani never persuades us that her Nazi setting is anything more than a lurid backdrop, while allowing Gudrun Landgrebe (so mesmerizing in “Woman in Flames”) to make a spectacle of herself, huffing and puffing through her love scenes as if she were running a 100-yard dash.

Mitsuko retains a ravishing air of mystery, largely because she rarely speaks. She’s a very obscure object of desire--a haiku in what should’ve been an epic poem of debauchery and enchantment. You can’t help but be aroused by Mitsuko’s fatal embrace with passion, but Cavani gives us so few clues to her motivations that we never get swept up in the character’s erotic obsessions.

“The Berlin Affair” (rated R for explicit sexual scenes) is burdened with enough sexual idolaltry, deceit and turmoil to make our heads swim, but the only scent here is the stale aroma of misbegotten melodrama.