Movie Reviews : ‘Call Me’ Has the Wrong Number

“Call Me” (Cinerama Dome) is an ambitious but flawed lady-in-distress thriller about a young Manhattan photographer/reporter, plagued by both an obscene phone caller and a drug gang. Like some of Hitchcock’s movies, it’s a moral fable about the punishment of the overly curious.

The film puts us in a pseudo- world of funky New York hip, but the plot structures are almost pure Brian De Palma. It’s an uneasy marriage.

Anna (Patricia Charbonneau) receives an anonymous lecherous call one night. Mistaking the caller for her lover Alex, she dashes off to a local bar to meet him, where she accidentally hears, from an adjoining rest room stall, a murder. From then on, she’s stalked from two sides--by the caller, who draws her into a world of kinky phone sex, and by the gang, including hipster Jellybean (Stephen McHattie) and psychotic Switchblade (Steve Buscemi), searching for the missing loot. Both pursuits seem equally fraught with danger and erotic promise.

Scenarist Karyn Kay is a film scholar who knows her structures and genre. Yet, in trying to make a feminist thriller--avoid the weak, terrorized victim-heroines of the genre--she partially sabotages her own suspense.

Pursued by shadowy mysterious men who either want to make love to her or kill her, Charbonneau plays Anna with such macha and chutzpah--such apparent obliviousness to one danger, and such relish in the other--that, after the first scene, it’s hard to work up empathy. If she isn’t worried much about this stuff, why should we be? And the question remains: Why can’t she recognize her boyfriend’s voice on the phone? Is their relationship that bad? (Maybe the caller should have whispered.)

The details and dialogue aren’t really convincing, and director Sollace Mitchell seems trapped in a style full of portentous camera movements and blind alleys, neither baroque nor naturalistic enough. There are some interesting performances: McHattie--in his usual James Dean-Vic Morrow mold--and Patti D’Arbanville, as Anna’s bumptious friend. Buscemi, of “Parting Glances,” might almost be doing a Frank Gorshin version of Richard Widmark as a punk; he has his moments, too.

But “Call Me” (MPAA-rated R for sex, violence and language) in the end can’t hold us on the line. Its fusion of murder, drugs and forbidden sex seems too schematic: guilt without pain, desire without danger, Hitchcock without the right hitch.