MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Exposure’ Settles for Less Than Tantalizing Potential

There may be something unconsciously premonitory about the fact that the people who’ve made a movie out of Rubem Fonseca’s fascinating Brazilian thriller “High Art” have changed its title to “Exposure” (Laemmle’s Fine Arts). Are these filmmakers--at least the ones doing the English-language version--as leery of the word art as the average American studio executive?

There is exposure in the movie: murdered prostitutes, nudity, three-way sex, the unveiling of Brazil’s cocaine cartels. And some art. The frames are succulently composed; the Brazilian and Bolivian backgrounds offbeat and spectacular; the dialogue--by novelist-screenwriter Fonseca and “English version” writer Matthew Chapman--spare and enigmatic. The core cast--Peter Coyote, Tcheky Karyo, Amanda Pays and the others--is many cuts above the norm.

But something doesn’t jell.

“Exposure” is full of violence--but it’s aestheticized bloodshed. In the film, Coyote’s saturnine photographer, named Mandrake (probably after the comic-strip magician), attempts to solve and avenge the death of a young Rio prostitute. Revenge spurs him on. He becomes an expert “Persev” (for “perforate and sever”) knife fighter, under the tutelage of the mysterious Hermes (Karyo of “La Femme Nikita”) and takes on the cocaine cartel itself: a band of villainous gargoyles, swilling in elegance, sunk in a Byzantine tangle of betrayal.

Unlike Fonseca’s novel, the film lacks a certain fantastic filigree. It’s been stripped down into a modern Samurai saga, like one of the ‘60s French gangster films of Jean-Pierre Melville, but it doesn’t have Melville’s chilly austerity or control. Someone has decided to add a narration, by Angst -ridden Mandrake, to this picture, and it often uncomfortably resembles those 1982 “Blade Runner” voice-overs. We don’t need it--though we could use a lot more of the book’s dense plot, inside jokes, twists and turns.

“Exposure,” by turning Coyote’s Mandrake from a lawyer into a photographer, also tries to become another “Blow-Up”-style movie meditation on the artist’s struggle between passivity and activism. Mandrake, who gets sucked out of his voyeurism into a maelstrom of carnage, ends up wielding knives instead of Nikons and, in the book, his quest is a little absurd.

Just as the novel was a burlesque roman noir, “Exposure” is a parody film noir , with Hitchcock and Polanski the most obvious influences. But perhaps parody isn’t the right word; there’s not much comic gusto in the film’s mimicry. The director, Walter Salles Jr., composes his scenes as if he had an objet d’art complex--and, midway through, the narrative line seems to snap apart. The deadly irony of the book’s ending is replaced with a climax that slides uneasily from sadism to sentimentality. The movie, impressive in pieces, lacks rhythm as a whole. Its high-tech, high-shock elements bury the theme.

Still, misfires like “Exposure” (MPAA rated R, probably for sex, nudity, language and violence) are more interesting than the usual misfires: the ones desperately trying and failing to repeat the mediocre. This movie really should have been “The Maltese Falcon” cubed. Instead, it comes off more like “High Art” diced: chunks of high talent bobbing in a stew of blood and aphorisms.

‘Exposure’

Peter Coyote: Peter Mandrake

Tcheky Karyo: Hermes

Amanda Pays: Marie

Raul Cortez: Lima Prado

A Miramax release. Director Walter Salles Jr. Producer Alberto Flaksman. Executive producer Paulo Carlos de Brito. Screenplay by Rubem Fonseca. Cinematographer Jose Roberto Eliezer. Editor Isabelle Rathery. Costumes Mari Stockler. Music Jurgen Knieper, Todd Boekelheide. Production design Nico Faria, Beto Cavalcanti. Knife Fighting Coach Christopher Kent. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

MPAA-rated R