Passion Of Mind

At first glance, this Hollywood feature produced by cowriter Ron Bass (Rain Man, When a Man Loves a Woman) and directed by Alain Berliner (Ma vie en rose) deals with the same theme as Shattered Image (1998), a mainstream feature written by Duane Poole and directed by Raul Ruiz, in which a Seattle hit woman dreams she’s a newlywed honeymooning in the Caribbean, who dreams in turn she’s a Seattle hit woman, etc. In Passion of Mind, a widow living with her two daughters in a French village and being courted by a novelist (Stellan Skarsgard) dreams she’s a New York literary agent being courted by an accountant (William Fichtner), and vice versa. But in fact the two movies are polar opposites. The two women in Shattered Image are both played by Anne Parillaud, and the point of the exercise isn’t psychological but a Ruizian mind fuck; in Passion of Mind, both women are played by Demi Moore (who isn’t bad, by the way), and the story is designed as a psychological puzzle, offering two romantic love stories for the price of one. The Ruiz film is fun but leads nowhere; Passion of Mind is slick and effective escapism with a touch of poetry (a la The Sixth Sense) that left me vaguely dissatisfied once the mystery was supposedly resolved. Read more