Sally Enitlav is an under-appreciated housewife looking to at least get a part-time job while her husband Alex is preoccupied with stock trading and talking in his sleep about someone from the office named Gretchen DeSanto. Some of his heavy dreams end with screams that wake him up and Sally believes it is guilt. Sally applies for what she expects to be a waitress position at Club Utopia only to discover what they want is a dancer. Embarrassed as she is, she goes through the motions of getting a burlesque license and learning that a client paying for a table dance actually expects her to take off some clothes. Alex begins to sense that Sally is being secretive about something, so he hires a private detective Richard Sabatini to follow her with help from a door to door perfume salesman calling himself Mr. Cologne. Involving Sabatini puts his own life in the cross-hairs of cameras and exposes him to blackmail over the relationship with Gretchen. Events escalate until Sally is ready to team up with Sabatini and turn the tables on Alex and putting his life comically in danger as his hidden assassin may have to reach around from hiding under a bed and attempt to jab a hypodermic into a buttock that is moving around while he entertains a female guest. Shiraz Tayyeb, the new actor playing Cologne, has a natural presence, and the club DJ Trevor Annon seems right at home. Brett Halsey has a grounded and understated authority with inherent humour as the owner of Club Utopia. Full disclosure: I was involved with the script for a couple of years in the Nineties and a few bits I was responsible for maybe didn't belong by time this movie was made. For example, a Basic Instinct murder parody at the start made sense and was timely in 1992 the year Basic Instinct was released. Also, Alex asks the detective why he has a fan running on a cold day and he says, "Atmosphere." That made sense if it was a ceiling fan I indicated and if the office evoked Phillip Marlow and Sam Spade era detectives, but the production had instead gone for a small desk fan. Those kinds of issues might only be a distraction for me and might not throw the average viewer. As Alex, Srdjan Nikolic's Russian accent removes any subtlety of delivery but seems suited for the agitated state of the character for much of the movie. Sally as played by Elsie Muller is at her most believable when angry or fully crazy. She has a typical movie star look and an edge that makes the more vulnerable aspects of the character seem less accessible to her. Frank A. Caruso directing himself as Sabatini has a few moments where he seems to aware of the humour, and the performance is much better when he has to be either the improbable voice of sanity or conning his own cousin Mr. Cologne into doing the dirty work of their caper.
Review of Club Utopia
