Kissed

April 18, 1997

By STEPHEN HOLDEN

hen Sandra Larson (Molly Parker), a beautiful young woman with hooded blue eyes, a fragile quivering mouth and an erotic attraction to dead bodies, describes making love to a corpse, her language takes on an ecstatic metaphysical lilt.

"I've seen bodies shining like stars," Sandra muses in her hushed voice-over narration to Lynne Stopkewich's morbidly enthralling fairy tale, "Kissed." For Sandra, making love to young dead men is an experience so intense she calls it "crossing over." "It's like looking into the sun and going blind," she explains quietly.

And as the camera observes Sandra ritualistically stripping, then dancing around a dead body in the funeral parlor where she works as an embalmer, we never see exactly what takes place. Moments after she climbs onto the embalming table and plants a gentle kiss on the ashen lips of a supine cadaver, the screen floods with white light as she becomes transported.

It would be easy to snicker at this Canadian film, were its subject not handled with a delicacy and lyricism that underscore the mystical rather than gruesome aspects of what Sandra coolly acknowledges is a consuming addiction.

As Sandra recalls her lifelong attraction to death, the movie flashes back to her isolated childhood, spent roaming through the woods, discovering small dead animals and burying them in elaborate funeral ceremonies. Sandra has her first menstrual period while cuddling a dead baby chipmunk that she is about to inter. Shortly after taking a job in a mortuary, she has her first erotic encounter with a human corpse while piloting a hearse through a symbolically torrential car wash.

It isn't until she is studying embalming in college that the virginal Sandra meets her Prince Charming, Matt (Peter Outerbridge), a handsome medical student who becomes her lover and fascinated confidant. Unable to compete with the chilly corpses she prefers over his warm, reciprocated passion, Matt becomes obsessed with necrophilia and volunteers to play dead for her, wearing zombie makeup. Their increasingly tormented relationship culminates in what might be described as a ghoulish role-reversed variation of "The Sleeping Beauty" played backward.

With its ethereal soundtrack of death-oriented pop songs and a luminous performance by Ms. Parker, who floats through the film like a mysterious sleepwalking angel, "Kissed" sustains a dreamy storybook atmosphere even in its more clinical moments.

The film offers a quickie course in embalming ("The jugular is for draining and the carotids for injecting," Sandra is informed by her solemn, glassy-eyed boss), but the camera discreetly pans away from an explicit how-to demonstration. Following one of Sandra's post-mortem trysts, Matt whiffs the odor of formaldehyde and notices the blood caked under her fingernails. But the camera never examines her hands, and the movie is mercifully unequipped with Smell-O-Vision. It would much rather drink in that gauzy white light streaming over Sandra's face as she goes into an erotic trance.

"Kissed" couldn't be demure, given its subject. Sandra's addiction isn't about the thrill of having sexual control or about finding radical ways to face one's fear of death. Its vision of necrophilia is a little girl's storybook dream of communion with the great beyond given a grown-up erotic twist.

Production Notes

KISSED

Directed by Lynne Stopkewich; written by Angus Fraser and Ms. Stopkewich, based on the story "We So Seldom Look on Love" by Barbara Gowdy; director of photography, Gregory Middleton; edited by John Pozer, Peter Roeck and Ms. Stopkewich; music by Don MacDonald; production designer, Eric McNab; produced by Dean English and Ms. Stopkewich; released by Goldwyn Entertainment Company. Running time: 78 minutes. This film is not rated.

Cast: Molly Parker (Sandra Larson) and Peter Outerbridge (Matt).