by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our “feature” last night was The Quickie, an oddball movie from 2001 produced by the German
companies Pyramid and Pandora Films (and released on DVD by an outfit called
Monarch), shot in the U.S. with two American stars but written and directed by
a Russian, Sergey Bodrov (though he had help with the actual screenplay from
one Carolyn Cavallero), and very
Russian not only in its personnel (the male lead is played by an actor named
Vladimir Mashkov) but its general mood. I had hoped from the video box that
this would be a kinky thriller in which a good-time girl played by Jennifer
Jason Leigh (who’s billed second in the credits but first on the DVD box) has a
casual one-night stand with a Russian mobster and then is chased by both the
police and the mobster’s gangland enemies on the idea that he might have told
her something incriminating while he was fucking her. Instead Mashkov plays
Oleg, a disillusioned and world-weary Russian mobster who lives in a big and
horrendously overdecorated house in Malibu (though it was “played” by Hermosa
Beach, probably because the licensing fees were cheaper) that we virtually
never leave during the entire 99-minute running time. He’s planning to turn the
whole mob business over to his brother Alex (Henry Thomas), who couldn’t care
less — all Alex wants to do is go for a career as a concert pianist (Oleg has
brought in a piano for him to practice on but it’s wretchedly out-of-tune — we
hear him, or rather his piano double Sasha Adler, play the “Tonight We Love”
opening of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and we notice the piano is out of
tune, and later dialogue establishes that as a deliberate plot point), while
their third brother Deema (played by Sergey Bodrov, Jr. — Bodrov was not
content to co-produce, co-write and direct this film but had to put his son in it as well, and the imdb.com page on Bodrov fils notes that a year after making this movie he died in
an avalanche in Russia, while Bodrov père is still alive) has the unctuous look of a Republican politician and does want to inherit the illegal enterprises his brother
wants to give up. Alex has surrounded himself with prostitutes, many of whom we
see topless (this film got an “R”-rating from both the breast exposure and the
constant F-bombs the characters are dropping — oddly, it was shot in the
old-fashioned 4:3 aspect ratio and only the topless scenes and incessant “fucks” in the dialogue distinguish
it from a TV-movie), but he also gets the hots for Lisa Powell (Jennifer Jason
Leigh), who’s got her own set of problems.
She’s living in a trailer that’s
parked in an encampment in an old parking lot in downtown L.A. (Charles looked
askance at this plot twist because he pointed out that any available space in downtown L.A. for a parking lot
would be used as such instead of being abandoned and turned into an al
fresco trailer park), and all we really
know about her at first is she has a six-year-old daughter who’s in foster care
but she’s given up on ever getting her daughter back from the child protective
services system. We don’t even know she’s gainfully employed until about midway
through the film, when her plotline and Oleg’s finally intersect; Oleg has
noticed that his mansion is infested with cockroaches (we get extreme close-ups
of a few of them and I was surprised the final credits didn’t list a “cockroach
wrangler”) and he calls in an exterminator — and Jennifer Jason Leigh dutifully
shows up driving a mini-van with “Western States Exterminators” painted on the
side. She’s dressed in a cute brown uniform that does a good job of showing her
ass — she looks considerably better in exterminator drag than she does in the
too-big black dress Oleg dresses her in later for their titular “quickie.” Also
in the dramatis personae are
Lesley Ann Warren as Anna, who’s supposed to be Oleg’s, Alex’s and Deema’s
mother but looks the same age as Oleg (this is one of those maddening movies in
which the characters supposedly playing members of the same family look too
dissimilar to be believable as genetic relations); the Venezuelan (or was he
Colombian? I forget) gigolo she’s just married; and a guy in a wheelchair that
gives a voice-over narration throughout the film and wins the house and the
beach property it’s on in a card game with Oleg.
Oleg’s disillusion with the
whole idea of life is summed up in a scene in which he invites one of the
prostitutes to his bedroom and announces that he’s going to bet her fee, double
or nothing, by playing Russian roulette: she’s supposed to bet whether he lives
or dies, and she bets he’ll die. He lives and takes back the money he was
supposed to pay her. (Both Charles and I thought she should have bet that he’d
live: if he’d lived he would have given her the money, and if he’d died she could
have taken it anyway.) The other thing that happens is that Oleg gets a call
warning him that rival mobsters in Moscow have taken out a hit on him, and at
first he suspects Lisa might be the hit person. Then Anna’s South American
boyfriend offers to put his
people in charge of Oleg’s security and they take over his house, and he thinks
they might be the hit squad — so
Oleg escapes his own house by hiding out in Lisa’s van as she leaves. Only, as
anyone who’s seen Prizzi’s Honor
could probably have guessed, Lisa is
the hit person who’s out to kill him — I guess Bodrov couldn’t resist the pun
of having her be an “exterminator” in both senses of the word — and the two
have a final confrontation on the beach. He tosses a coin and calls heads, and
it lands on heads, therefore giving her his rather twisted consent to complete
her job and ending this weirdly unsatisfying movie on the expected downer note.
The Quickie comes off like The
Godfather would have if Dostoyevsky had
written it: for something that’s supposed to be a crime thriller there’s
virtually no action, and that house in Malibu gets as oppressive to us as it is
to the characters, while the movie is so full of world-weariness and angst we also feel as trapped in it as Oleg does. It’s one
of those frustrating bad movies that seemed to have a good movie locked up
inside it and struggling to get out, and it also suffers from an all too common
problem with modern films: there’s no one in the dramatis personae we actually like.
