When we choose a movie the hope often is that in some way it will captivate us, and provide escape. All too often, though, movies are fraught with errors and inconsistencies, not to mention mediocre story lines, and inadequate acting. The result is that we become all too aware that we are watching a movie and the experience becomes less than it should be. Indiscreet is such a film.
Luke Perry plays Michael Nash, a private investigator who is hired to tail the wife of a millionaire in order prove adultery for a divorce. After three weeks on the job, Nash becomes convinced that Eve is seeing no one and is just a desperately unhappy woman. While spying on her, Nash ends up rescuing Eve when she attempts suicide. Before long, Nash becomes her lover and then the main suspect when her husband is murdered.
A description of some of the blatant inaccuracies in the film might seem like nit picking, but these are just symptomatic of problems throughout the film and they are frequent enough to prove quite distracting. Most striking is the use of a 35-millimetre camera by Nash. Throughout the film, he points his camera at his subject, Eve, who is usually just barely visible to the naked eye. The camera in question has a very small lens, but when it is trained on the subject, we suddenly can see a picture with such detail it could only have been taken by a camera with an extremely large lens. In another example, Nash spends more than three weeks spying on his subject. He does so by tailing her on deserted roads and parking outside her exclusive home in a distinctive bright yellow convertible. Somehow, through all this none-too-subtle surveillance, he is never sighted. Indiscreet asks us to ignore discrepancies like this and many more, assaulting our intelligence over and over.
Annoying idiosyncrasies aside, there is really nothing especially wrong with Indiscreet, except that it never rises above mediocrity. The suspenseful story line has just enough twists to keep us from guessing the outcome. The love story has some nice steamy moments, and the acting is competent, considering the weak material the cast has been given to work with.
With more attention to detail, this might have been a good film. Unfortunately, the elements that lack credibility are so central to the story they are impossible to ignore.
