Call Me

In the hands of a young Brian De Palma, Call Me might have become a twisted little classic. But De Palma has advanced to the respectability of The Untouchables, so the directing chores on Call Me fall to one Sollace Mitchell, and the resulting movie is a frustrating film that should have been better.

Though it has the structure of a sexual thriller, Call Me is really the character study of a New York reporter, played by Patricia Charbonneau. One night she receives a blunt, openly seductive phone call from a man she assumes is her boyfriend. When she shows up at a bar to meet him, she accidentally witnesses a murder instead. Not only that, but the caller was not her boyfriend, merely a strange voice in the night.

The caller continues to make contact, and she is curiously attentive to his entreaties. At the same time, an exotic figure (Stephen McHattie) from the bar is following her. Is he the caller, or is he connected with the murder – or both?

The film, written by Karyn Kay, posits a number of possible suspects for the identity of the obscene caller. The important thing, it turns out, is not the identity of the phantom breather, but the fact that Charbonneau is drawn more and more by the lure of the erotic calls. She’s bored by her inattentive boyfriend, and rather at loose ends professionally. Eventually she succumbs to a torrid session of phone sex, in a scene involving her interaction with an orange. Yes, an orange.

In a better movie, people everywhere would be talking about that scene; the orange might’ve attained the status of the stick of butter in Last Tango in Paris or the back seat of the limo in No Way Out. Alas, Call Me isn’t quite coherent or stylish enough to lash all of its intriguing ideas together.

In its failure, the movie wastes a few good film-noir performances by McHattie and Steve Buscemi, as cadaverous hoodlums, and Patti D’Arbanville, as the heroine’s ditzy pal. Most of all, the film wastes the performance of Patricia Charbonneau, the raven-haired actress best known for her role as the lustful lesbian in Desert Hearts. Charbonneau is excellent at suggesting the dark side of this normal person; when the murder is going on a few feet away from her, she gets a look of almost animal fear and excitement in her dark eyes.

First published in The Herald, May 1988

If there had been more of a neo-noir craze at this moment, the movie might have caught on more. By the way: Call Me, a sex orange; Call Me by Your Name, a sex peach. Coincidence? Despite this film’s flop, Charbonneau should have gone on to a more prominent career, and it didn’t happen, although she worked pretty steadily in TV for the next 20 years. The cast includes David Strathairn and Boyd Gaines (a four-time Tony winner). McHattie and Buscemi play characters named Jellybean and Switchblade, which sounds like a spin-off series waiting to happen. Karyn Kay, whose screen credits were limited, died in a strange way, which I leave it to you to look up. She wrote three books on film.