Nicholas Kazan, the son of Hollywood royalty, is better known for being a screenwriter than a director. Kazan has penned the scripts for Bicentennial Man (1999), At Close Range (1986) and Patty Hearst (1988), among many others, but has only directed a handful of films. One such film is Dream Lover (1993), which Kazan also wrote, for Gramercy Pictures, a subsidiary of Universal Studios.
Dream Lover is an erotic thriller that plays with the misogynistic fantasy of the “scheming wife”. The protagonist of the piece, Ray (James Spader), is recently divorced when he meets the enchanting Lena (Mädchen Amick). In no time at all Ray and Lena have married and started a family. Yet, as things seem to be sailing along smoothly, Ray begins to have his doubts about Lena. As Ray investigates his wife he begins to uncover truth after truth until he realizes that she’s orchestrated their entire marriage to get at his money. Lena’s machinations leave Ray committed in an asylum with only one course of revenge available to him: murder.
First and foremost Kazan is a writer. Kazan may nod towards the Film Noirs of Jacques Tourneur and Robert Siodmak but as a filmmaker Kazan’s style is relatively workman-like. The production design in Dream Lover is wrought with nineties decadence but Kazan’s camera never seems to know how to capitalize on that design. Dream Lover feels flat and sterile when it should feel suspenseful.
If one compares Dream Lover to other erotic thrillers of the time it’s clear that Kazan is unsure how to subvert the misogyny inherent to the Film Noir genre that he’s so preoccupied with. Erotic thrillers of the late eighties and early nineties were plentiful and almost all of them had their eye on the expressionistic thrillers of the forties. The most successful films of the erotic thriller renaissance intentionally found ways or just explored visual counter measures to the sexism that is so prevalent in these films. Some solid examples of quasi feminist or just subversive neo noir films are DePalma’s Body Double (1984), Hopper’s The Hot Spot (1990), or Dahl’s Red Rock West (1993).
Without an appropriate counter point to the misogynist attitudes of Dream Lover the film is simply a bloated spectacle of masculinist angst. Even here the film tends to falter. Kazan is squeamish in how he stages the prolonged sex scenes, preferring to simply ogle Amick’s naked body. Sex scenes in these films are at their best as physical manifestations of the power struggle between two parties as if a shared orgasm would somehow equalize their positions.
Where Kazan ought to be at his most inventive he appears to be downright confused. Every so often Dream Lover is punctuated with dream sequences in which James Spader’s character has a confrontation with a clown at a carnival. The objects in these sequences recall Fellini very explicitly while the blocking and framing is lifted out of the most unimaginative daytime television. This gives these dream sequences the effect of halting the narrative rather than adding depth to a shallow character.
