'Killing Me Softly' - Mainstream Films Featuring BDSM Practices - Part 3

Killing Me Softly (2002) is the veteran award-winning Chinese director Kaige Chen's first English language feature. He is a respected director, who's also responsible for the remarkable 'Farewell My Concubine', 'The Emperor and the Assassin', and the less widely-seen 'Temptress Moon'. The movie stars Heather Graham, Joseph Fiennes and Natascha McElhone, and is filmed almost entirely in the nice areas of London using a sub-standard script. The ending of the movie was different from the ending in the novel by Nicci French (a pseudonym for the husband-and-wife team of Sean French and Nicci Gerard). It got a lot of bad reviews and was denied a theatrical release in America. It's supposed to be a gripping, intense thriller with lashings of erotic sex. The film does boast some very hot, almost nonstop, rape-like sex scenes with a quasi-BDSM element, where Heather Graham's ravishing body is shown totally naked, as is Fiennes' buttocks. Graham is in almost every frame of this film, and naked from head to toe in many scenes, positions and alleyways. The story is told mostly in flashback by Alice (Heather Graham), telling police about her troubled relationship with Adam (Joseph Fiennes). Alice is a beautiful blonde American software and website designer who has moved to London, where she has a nice, safe, reliable relationship with her boring roommate-boyfriend, who is a soccer loving Englishman. Alice and Adam make eye contact one morning at a city crosswalk as she goes to work, and finds herself following him to a nearby bookstore, where she learns he is renowned mountaineer. She is fidgety from the moment she first lays eyes on him, and has an obsessed morning at work. Within five minutes she is not only leaving work to get a so called 'haircut', but also to meet up with him, then take a virtually mute cab ride to his place (we learn later that it's his sister's), where they have an outrageous and amazing sexual encounter. An afternoon of mind-altering, life-changing sex, with a man who can get so deep into her mind and thoughts, yet know nothing about him. Alice soon dumps her boyfriend to pursue her raging lust for Adam, by moving into his swanky apartment. Adam introduces her to his friends, including fellow mountaineer Klaus (Ulrich Thomsen), and to his curious sister, the beautiful and enigmatic Deborah (Natascha McElhone), whom she at first believes is Adam's lover and then finds is his sister. In doing so, he also introduces her to his exhilarating world of mountain climbing, where extreme risk and potential danger are as heady as oxygen. There is a shocking scene where a bag-snatching thief attempted to rob Alice, but Adam chases him down and beats him to a bloody pulp in a phone booth. His apparent inability to stop, is a revealing key to Adam's character. While still splattered with the mugger's blood, Adam turns and proposes to Alice, which she gladly accepts. So begins Alice's headlong descent into desire and obsession. It doesn't hurt that he's a legitimate mountaineering hero, or that his bedroom technique takes her to places where she's never been before. Their wedding nuptials are followed by him photographing her nude in a churchyard before making her stomp after him on a day long hike in the woods to a remote cabin, where she is tied topless with a very long scarf to a wall, and then makes love to her while the scarf tugs at her neck. As the scarf tightening around her throat, she is introduced to bondage and erotic asphyxiation. Alice recounts in voiceover, I gave up all control, I let him decide when I could breathe and when I couldn't, and I loved it. Then she has sex on her back and up against a wall. Alice soon discovers that Adam wants to own and control her every move. Then things begin to change.. and Alice is reminded that she knows nothing about her husband. In the meantime, she starts to receive anonymous cautionary notes warning her about Adam, "How much do you really know about him?" Alice learns, from his sister Deborah, about a climbing accident in which Adam's girlfriend died, and this leads to her hearing about another girlfriend who has disappeared. Along with a locked closet full of love letters from a former lover and lurid polaroids, Alice starts to suspect that her husband might be responsible for the deaths of the two former girlfriends. The rest of the film is spent on her trying to know her husband's suspicious past. Alice begins to realise she is in mortal danger. Suspicion and paranoia gradually drive her to the brink of insanity, as she attempts to determine Adam's innocence, or guilt, once and for all. She becomes increasingly isolated from the outside world because nobody else will believe her and she is forced to rely on her own strengths to save herself. Alice finds herself trussed up on a kitchen table while Adam scolds her for not trusting him. She sheepishly says: 'I have to pee' and subsequently tries to escape through the bathroom window. Soon she's fleeing through the empty streets of London in her undies, but the police refuse to offer much help because, after all, everything was consensual. There's the shovel-swinging climax in a foggy graveyard and it is revealed that Adam and his sister had an incestuous relationship when they were children, and she taught him various sexual tricks, which Adam later demonstrated to Alice. Movie Clips If you Google: "Killing Me Softly sex" it will bring up the site 'Celebrity Movie Archive' where you will find 7 mpg downloadable clips from the movie. This includes the scene where Heather Graham is tied topless with a very long scarf to a wall and is then ridden while the scarf tugs at her neck before having sex on her back and then up against a wall.