The Intended (2002) from Johnny Web

A poor couple from the north of England arrives at a Malay jungle station in 1924, he to engineer a road through the jungle, she (co-author Janet McTeer) to accompany him. She is significantly older than her partner, and they seem to be running away from some uncomfortable situation back home, but their history is not explicitly presented. The newcomers realize that it is not just they who have come to the jungle to escape. The white people who live at the post, headed by the penurious widow who runs the operation, are a close-knit collection of bizarre and eccentric characters, and they do not make it especially comfortable for the outsiders to get adjusted.

Living and working conditions at the jungle outpost are quite different from what the newcomers had expected. Their salary is not to be paid until their assignment has been completed, in contradiction to what they were told in England. Their living quarters are infested with insects and their putative bedroom is an open area separated by a flimsy curtain from the priest's room. It would be difficult enough for the couple to have a sex life with a priest a few feet away, but they have other problems of their own. She seems to be sexually frigid, and has never had an orgasm in her life. As if the entire situation were not comfortable enough, she is required to sit around the station for months at a time with nothing to do whilst he makes his road-building excursions into the jungle.

Given that she is the only sexually desirable woman in the camp, her presence, coupled with her fiancé's absence, triggers various passions among the local menfolk, particularly the station manager's odd son, who is 40ish but still has a unusually close relationship with his elderly nanny. I mean really close. I mean that the nanny gives him regular sexual relief. This is quite a sight to see, given that he's a fat guy with rotting teeth, and the nanny is Olympia Dukakis. As you might well imagine, a guy who has been stuck in the jungle with his domineering mother, and whose only sexual outlet is Olympia Dukakis, finds himself very interested when Janet McTeer is walking around the camp with her DDD chest barely covered. Mischief ensues.

The script takes a page from the classic French film Going Places in that the formerly frigid woman manages to get her rocks off when manipulated into sex with the fat, ugly guy! This is an experience which confuses and shames her. The fat guy, however, is delighted to find that sex can be better than a hand-job from Olympia Dukakis.

You'd think all of that would be enough of a premise to carry a movie, as it was (more or less) for The Night of the Iguana. You might think that, but in this case, you would be wrong. The movie sets all of that up, then moves its focus elsewhere - to a noir sub-plot about a greedy struggle between the powerful widow, her nephew, her son, and even the priest, all of whom are maneuvering to get enough of the ivory money to get the hell out of hell and back to civilization. The weepy melodrama eventually leads to so much greed, murder, suicide, deceit and torture that you'd think their company must be Halliburton and their jungle must actually be Dick Cheney's undisclosed location.

On the other hand, it is the Citizen Kane of Olympia Dukakis hand-job movies.

Notes on the DVD:

Four words: do NOT buy it.

It's not that good a script to begin with. Add to that the fact that the cinematography is lackluster, shot on DV and harshly lit. Then top off those two negatives with a terrible DVD transfer - not only poorly done, but censored!! First of all, it presents a perfunctory pan-n-scan full screen version of the film, with faces and other important information cut off at the sides. (There is also a trailer on the disc, which is presented in a widescreen aspect ratio, and which looks much better. Even the flesh tones are better on the trailer than in the film proper, which is too yellow.)

Not only is the film butchered in terms of photographic composition, but the DVD has been heavily censored. The original film is a treasure-trove of Janet McTeer nudity, every frame of which has been snipped for the DVD! (Although male nudity has been retained.)

That is a shame, because the disk also includes about an hour's worth of in-depth interviews with the cast and the director, all of which is wasted because of the butchered and censored transfer of the film they are discussing so earnestly.