That Movie Site :: Hussy (1980)

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HUSSY

Reviewed by Heather Picker

One of the earliest hooker movies of the 1980s (and there ended up being a lot of them), Hussy also has the distinction of being one of the most confused. When you look at some of its company – Ken Russell's insanely messy Crimes of Passion and Martin Ritt's ridiculous Nuts, for example – you understand what an achievement that is.

The hooker here is frizzy-haired Beaty, played by Helen Mirren in a performance that mostly requires her to wear lots of makeup and dangle cigarettes between her lips. She has quit her job as a "hostess" at the Baron Club before, but reappears one night, joining the pool of bored-looking women hoping to get picked for "dates" with moneyed clients. When a coworker asks why she has returned, Beaty takes a drag off one of those omnipresent cigarettes and replies, "I missed the champagne."

Her job isn't glamorous. (Hussy isn't chic like Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa, or preposterously glossy like Half Moon Street. It has the dull, flat look and spirit of a made-for-TV movie that was dated before it ever premiered.) She watches the same cheesy musical show every night and must pretend to be interested in the not-very-interesting men who rent her time. By the end of the evening, when she finds herself in darkened hotel rooms with customers eager to complete business transactions, Beaty can hardly contain her irritation -- not that her johns notice the way she looks over their shoulders in boredom and exasperation once they tumble into bed.

It's at the Baron Club that she meets Emory (John Shea), a globetrotting American who works the lights during awful performances. He is immediately smitten (for reasons unknown to us) and asks her out. She isn't interested in romance and turns him down. He moonlights as a chauffeur until he's earned enough money to set up a date with her through the Club, but she rebuffs his advances at the end of the evening. "You're obviously broke and I'm expensive," she tells him, cool as ice. Undeterred, he asks her to spend the night, no sex involved. "I just want you to be here when I wake up." Just like that, Beaty's eyes soften. And in case we missed her subtle shift in expression – Mirren's eyes, after all, aren't soft as Shea's – the music gets soggy and romantic in a way that will either make you want to throw up or buy feminine hygiene products.

Everything in Hussy, written and directed by Matthew Chapman, is equally obvious. In a typical scene, Beaty and Emory are in bed together and he tries to kiss her, to which she announces, "I don't kiss." He looks at her like it's news to him and says, "You don't kiss? What do you do?" She pauses – she'd take another drag off a cigarette, if only she had one nearby – and replies, "Everything else." I mean really, what the fuck? They're already naked, they've already had sex, and they've been having sex for God knows how long and only now does he realize she doesn't kiss? The entire screenplay has a cut and paste feel, like Chapman scribbled little soap opera-inspired scenes he found amusing and tried to cobble them together in a feature-length movie. (By the way, after she gives her cheeky response, cheesy romantic music plays again, ostensibly because the characters are naked in the countryside.) And even that he didn't get right, because anyone who has ever seen an episode of the shoulder-padded primetime TV that defined the '80s knows you don't say a line like "everything else" while completely undressed. You say it in a Nolan Miller gown or from a bubble bath.

Emory, it turns out, is a widower, and there's a bit of Lifetime Television suspense at first surrounding his wife's death. (Mostly this means John Shea is called on to look all sad-eyed, which he can do with the best of them.) In between all of their eating by candlelight and wine sipping, Beaty reveals she experienced a loss of her own when her ex won a bitter custody battle five years earlier. When her profession came out in court – and in the papers – she was denied anything but the occasional weekend with her son. Why then, Emory asks, does she continue to hook? The legal bills, Beaty says, only half-joking, were so large that it didn't make financial sense to quit.

It's a quip that could set up an interesting movie, but Chapman can't decide whether Hussy is about Beaty or the criminal antics of other characters, and halfway through the film the screenplay switches gears to focus on Emory's less-then-legal gig doing something – I must have yawned and missed what, exactly, it was – for drug-dealing pal Max (Murray Salem), who is strangely introduced to confused viewers when he drunkenly stumbles into a mostly lesbian nightclub and harasses the women before – tah da! – revealing his own homosexuality. (Chapman, it turns out, is killing two birds with one stone since Emory and Beaty were only at the club to begin with so he could show us Beaty is equally desirable to the fairer sex. Alas, what threatens to turn into a hilarious icy-Euro-dyke Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant-ish subplot goes bust in no time.)

Salem's sarcastic, coke-snorting bitch injects a bit of life to the proceedings – he could be a templates for the Olivier character on Six Feet Under – but the big score storyline is so convoluted and out of left field that soon he's just another annoyance. And because things aren't screwy enough by the time Max is plotting with Emory, another character is added to the mix when Alex (Paul Angelis), a violent, Demerol-popping oaf from Beaty's past, arrives fresh out of a state-ordered stint a mental hospital and ready to reclaim his woman.

If it's not about a hooker trying to sort out her personal life and win back her son, and it's not about Emory doing whatever the hell it is Emory does, what is Hussy about? We never get close enough to the characters to find out. (Maybe it's a thwarted softcore porn movie – there's an over-the-top explicit scene or two between Mirren and Shea.)

By the second half of the film Mirren hardly has a role, and when she does show up it's to look worried when Alex reveals he has a gun, get starry-eyed as she talks about getting her son back and opening an antique shop in the country (why not become an astronaut or national security advisor while she's at it?), and reply to every single thing Emory says with a sigh an impassioned cry of "Make love to me!" As things get more and more preposterous and clichés pile up and actors are forced to say things like, "You're gonna get yourself killed!" and "Oh, Christ! We're gonna be so happy!", you might think you know what's coming next. With his abrupt, half-assed ending from hell, Chapman denies you even that meager satisfaction.

About the DVD: Hussy is available on DVD from First Run Features. Special features include a Helen Mirren filmography, a photo gallery, and trailers for First Run releases as diverse as Mongolian Ping Pong, Score, Go for Zucker and Agnes and His Brothers.

Written and Directed by Matthew Chapman. Starring Helen Mirren and John Shea, with Murray Salem and Paul Angelis. 1980, 95 min., Rated R (for nudity, sexual content and profanity).

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