TV Reviews : Ex-Hooker Returns to Her Trade in ‘Secrets’

The metallic world of high-price call girls--especially one who thought she could quit--is dramatized in a coolly insidious portrait of marital betrayal, “Those Secrets” (at 9 tonight on ABC, Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42).

Blair Brown, in a role that is as startling as it is devilishly calibrated, stars as a regal-looking wife whose happy marriage is torn apart by successive jolts.

The husband (affectionately played by Arliss Howard) foolishly confesses to an infidelity that, in turn, triggers the wife’s confrontation with her dark past. That past is personified in the flesh when the wife is visited by a flaky old girlfriend (Mare Winningham) who, we discover in some delicious throwaway lines, is a prostitute in from the cold.

The realization that Brown’s demure and serene wife is also an ex-hooker is the ultimate turnabout in Lauren Currier’s stylish script. The wife’s subsequent psychological free fall back into her old trade, while keeping it secret from her family, propels Brown’s Jekyll and Hyde odyssey.

It’s a strange movie, curiously refreshing for TV while baffling to the end. And in a plot fraught with psychological sand traps, the story is salvaged by the alluring Brown.