- guardian.co.uk,
- Sunday May 02 1999 19:00 BST
It's the fetish of our times: not sex, but great places to live with enviable furniture. Sadly, since the Eighties, few films have been brave enough to linger on the kitchen's marble work surfaces before reluctantly returning to the action. But all that's changing, and nowhere more obviously than in Cruel Intentions, the latest screen version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses.
The story has been moved to present-day Manhattan, and its schemers and victims are now teenagers, but Cruel Intentions loses none of the decadence of Choderlos de Laclos' novel. This is the Upper East Side as baroque wonderland. 'I wanted you to feel as if you were walking into a Parisian ballroom,' said its production designer Jon Gary Steele, but surely no Parisian ballroom was ever this opulent. The actors are frequently shot from across rooms, or from the hall, so the audience can appreciate the beauty of the antique French furniture.
Appropriately, it was the quintessentially Eighties actor Michael Douglas who ushered in the return of the property porn film. The Game (1997) dabbled in the genre, but last year's A Perfect Murder went the whole way. In it, Douglas and Gwyneth Paltrow occupy an immense New York apartment, complete with a vast terrace on Central Park, Picassos on the walls and an enormous kitchen, but the highlight of the film is what might also be termed a tap - a vast stainless steel plate over which water cascades into the bath. Even Paltrow's supposedly impoverished lover lives in the definitive artist's loft - owned, in real life, by Dennis Hopper.
Douglas's finest hour was Wall Street (1987), in which his disciple Charlie Sheen desperately overstretches his finances so that he can buy the perfect Eighties flat. As a symbol of the time, the latter apartment was only matched in 9½ Weeks (1985) - superficially a tale of sexual obsession, director Adrian Lyne's true passion was for the matt black surfaces that defined Mickey Rourke's existence. Lyne's film owes a lot to the stylish emptiness of Tony Scott's The Hunger (1983), which demonstrates that, whatever else their faults, vampires have excellent taste in big, airy houses.
In contrast to New York, London's real estate has been comparatively ill-served in the movies in recent times. There was Truly, Madly, Deeply in 1991, in which Juliet Stevenson's tears fell on the fashionably bare wood floor of her rambling north London home; and the recent Bedrooms and Hallways, whose title rather gives it away. But the best indication that London is back is a film which takes its title - and property-based view of the world - from a fatally desirable chunk of real estate: Notting Hill.
