Monster on the edge

Writer-director Dylan Kidd's debut movie is a sulphurous life in the night of a rake, a shagmaster extraordinaire whose attempts to pass on his knowledge to his virgin nephew coincide with his own slide from the priapic heights of the seasoned seducer.

Roger (Campbell Scott) is an advertising copywriter by day and a libertine by night, part Jack Nicholson (in Carnal Knowledge mode) and part Bill Murray with feral genes. He is unapologetic, scathing in his technique and given to bouts of acidulous candour with the opposite sex; he is, in short, a bastard. How he became like this is never explained or explored and this might be considered one of the movie's few weaknesses.

Certainly, he begins on a high, holding court in a restaurant with his current lover, Joyce (Isabella Rossellini) - who also happens to be his boss - and his colleagues, with an articulate and motor-mouthed exposition of men and women, and the primal differences between the two. Wreathed in the smoke of the constant cigarettes he smokes, a martini glass always to hand, he appears to be the roguish bon viveur envied by men and fancied by women.

Yet even in his opening speech, we can sense that there is something amiss; he is a man whose finger is constantly poised over the selfdestruct button. He argues loquaciously (and persuasively) that men will eventually become redundant, that the time will come when all that women will need them for will be to move furniture. Behind the cynical facade there lurks a fear that is never expressed, but is ever present.

Roger is soon dumped by Joyce, who reminds him that, good as he is at his job, he is easily replaceable. With his ego bruised black and blue, and redundancy threatened, he is then lumbered with his 16-year-old nephew, Nick (Jesse Eisenberg), who arrives out of the blue, apparently for a college interview. But the boy also wants "Wicked" Uncle Roger to instruct him in the fine art of seduction and help him to lose his virginity.

At first reluctant, Roger is flattered by the kid's attentions. Before long, they embark on a long night's journey into the depths of sexual realpolitik, commencing with a lengthy (if ultimately unsatisfactory) flirtation with two girls (Elizabeth Berkley and Jennifer Beales) in a sophisticated bar. From then on, it's all downhill, and by the following morning he emerges in a new light. Not chastened, perhaps, but different.

Kidd's movie succeeds on several levels. The guerrilla-style filmmaking results in fashionably jagged camerawork and his framing and composition is eccentric: arms, hands, passing people, traffic and objects often obscure the main subject. The technique conveys a real sense of after-dark Manhattan with the camera acting as an outsider, hanging around on the fringes, eavesdropping on Roger's pearls of "wisdom".

Campbell Scott (son of George C Scott and who gave a memorable portrait of Robert Benchley in Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle) puts away his usual nice-guy persona to create a brilliant portrait of a man at war with women. He works wonders in suggesting Roger's flaws and weaknesses: the persistent smoking, the machine-gun delivery, the laceratingputdowns, all smokescreens (some literal) to hide a lost and lonely soul. And his glacier-blue eyes are transparent enough to glimpse the humanity he is holding in check.

When Nick asks his uncle what he does for a living, Roger replies: "I sit here all day and think up ways of making people feel bad about themselves." He tells a girl in a bar that her personality is composed of nothing more than "a collection of Vanity Fair articles". With a sadism that is both remorseless and gleeful, he unravels a middle-aged woman who has been stood up by her young lover. The fact that some of the cruel "home-truths" he tells her are accurate only makes his attack more squirmingly painful.

Unencumbered by studio pressure for a redemptive feelgood conclusion, Kidd concludes with a one-two combination that leaves room for speculation-Roger does finally exhibit a vestigial sense of decency when he drags his young ward out of a brothel, but it hardly amounts to a Damascene conversion. And his concluding words of advice to Nick and his male schoolfriends is untempered by remorse.