MOVIE REVIEWS : LOOKS AT LOVE’S DARK, LIGHT SIDES : ‘Someone to Watch’ an Erotic Thriller of Clashing Cultures

Ridley Scott’s “Someone to Watch Over Me” (selected theaters) is an erotic culture-clash thriller that’s almost swoony with glamour and romance. The movie is exciting, richly textured. But, despite its high quality, there’s something unformed about it, like a poem that doesn’t quite sing, a painting with a color missing.

Scott is an ex-painter, and, as a film maker, he specializes in visual tours de force: shimmering recreations of the past (“The Duellists”), nightmarishly vivid evocations of the future (“Blade Runner” and “Alien”). Here, he steeps the sights and sounds of New York in the same dense photographic splendor.

The faces are splendid, too. The movie is about a statuesque New York cop caught in a triangle along with his sexy wife and a stunning murder witness that he has been assigned to guard. The adulterous lovers come from different classes: the cop, Mike Keegan (Tom Berenger) from a middle-range Queens neighborhood; the witness, Claire Gregory (Mimi Rogers) from the posh heights of Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

It’s a simple, schematic story, pivoting around two crises: Keegan’s failing marriage and the mounting threats to Claire’s life. And, at times, all this seems simply a hook on which Scott can hang his dazzling nocturnal urban visions.

Like Woody Allen’s “Manhattan,” which was also scored to George Gershwin, “Someone” is a love poem to New York. But, where Allen fixed on intellectual ambiance, Scott--a Britisher who treats the boroughs almost as if they were alien planets--lingers over surfaces: Queens homes with packed backyards, the leafy sweep of Central Park, Manhattan’s teeming heart and the dark glow of the streets after nightfall. The sound track keeps repeating the lush, plaintive title song--in versions by Sting, Gene Ammons and Roberta Flack--and the first time we hear it, it’s over a spectacular nighttime helicopter shot, high above the city, soaring through the glass canyons and skyscrapers, crossing the 59th Street Bridge and then zeroing in on Queens.

After this brilliant opening, Scott draws the opposing worlds with great economy and vigor: a beer-and-dance party in a Spartan, workaday Queens living room where one bosomy blonde in scarlet glows like a plastic rose; and a super-rich spree of Manhattan jet-setters carousing at a dreamily lavish disco. Scott’s camera glides through these plush Art Deco rooms and hallways--in chilly, seemingly subaqueous light--until we watch, with Claire, a brutal argument and slaying: one in which the victim is as hateful as his killer, Joey Venza (Andreas Katsulas).

Murder and fear then trigger love. Berenger’s Keegan becomes a Romeo despite himself. Brought into Claire’s Upper East Side apartment--where every surface gleams and the light seems filtered through silk--he and her other police bodyguards are treated like delivery boys: forced to cool their heels in the lobby and kitchen by Claire’s frizzy-haired snot of a boyfriend (John Rubinstein). Gradually--with the inevitability common to discos and movie romances--Keegan and Claire come together, creating the kind of scandal common to soap operas.

Yet, irony aside, the love story works. In the central three roles, Berenger, Rogers and Lorraine Bracco have a sheer photogenic force that makes them fine romantic principals. It’s the thriller elements that seem dubious. Scott’s gossamer ribbons seem often snagged on the jagged edge of prototypical plotting. The suspense mechanism is far too visible, too obviously a mechanism. The set pieces--the chase through the Guggenheim, one attempted murder and a Mexican standoff--actually begin to seem intrusive.

And, at the end, when the two strands are intertwined, the plot has become almost tyrannical: Poor Joey Venza is asked to abandon all sanity, every scrap of even reasonably psychotic self-preservation, simply to trigger off a properly neat wrap-up and double climax.

Howard Franklin’s screenplay has an ingenious set-up and smooth flow, but it lacks edge and depth. And it also lacks characters, especially the offbeat, pungent, minor parts that were once the marrow of film noir . There’s also an imbalance throughout the movie. We see Keegan penetrating Claire’s world, but Claire never really enters his--and it might be interesting if she did, if there were one scene, only one, when he took her to Queens. Instead, the movie shows Keegan batted back and forth between his wife and mistress, and, perhaps unintentionally, it degenerates into a contest with too many moral issues solved in advance.

Yet, when the camera simply follows the reckless couple through their dangerous night, washed in cool shadows and jewellike color, the glamour surges back up. Even if “Someone to Watch Over Me” (MPAA-rated R: for sex and violence) is flawed, it’s the kind of film that offers you many subsidiary pleasures--Berenger’s watchful blue stare, Bracco’s tough accent, Rogers’ swanky self-assurance, the flood of gorgeous imagery cascading past, and, most of all, Scott’s rapturous views of the city. Illogical, flawed or forced thrillers are all too common. Ones that knock your eyes out are rare.

‘SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME’ A Columbia Pictures presentation. Producers Thierry de Ganay, Harold Schneider. Director, executive producer Ridley Scott. Script Howard Franklin. Camera Steven Poster. Production design Jim Bissell. Music Michael Kamen. Editor Claire Simpson. With Tom Berenger, Mimi Rogers, Lorraine Bracco, Jerry Orbach, John Rubinstein, Andreas Katsulas.

Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes.

MPAA rating: R (younger than 17 requires an accompanying parent or adult guardian).