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Exploring themes that have been covered before to varying degrees of success by Sondheim (SWEENEY TODD) and director Antonia Bird in the even darker horror-comedy RAVENOUS, PASSIONS is a marvelous concept, but it seems as if something got lost in the translation from play to screenplay. Pythonites take heed; Terry Jones and Michael Palin wrote the play SECRETS, then adapted that for the screenplay, but this is Swiftian satire that's pitch black even by Python's standards. I guess a considerable part of what the problems are with this movie lie in Giles Foster's direction. He doesn't seem to be sure if he's making an all-out slap-schticky farce, or a savage "veddy-veddy" British comedy of human foibles and frailties. In trying to give us the best of both worlds, the film suffers instead from a kind of unfocused schizophrenia. What wonders would have been wrought if Terry Gilliam had directed, and Palin had taken the starring role (which seems to be written for him anyway), thereby completing the Python connection? Alas, we'll never know, but as it is, it's not half bad, and you could do MUCH worse.
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