The Art of Passion (Qubefilms, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched another Lifetime movie, The Art of Passion, which like the one they’d aired the night before, A Dangerous Affair, was both written and directed by Christie Will Wolf, who turns out to be a Black woman from Canada (I suppose we’d have to call her “African-Canadian,” the old joke I made to my mother when I first heard the term “African-American” and I said, “Does that mean we now have to call Oscar Peterson an ‘African-Canadian’?”). I’d watched one of her movies before on LIfetime, Killer Ending, which won some sort of award for its script but which I found just silly, albeit silly in the best Lifetime tradition (it’s about a woman mystery writer named “Agatha Sayers” – an obvious mashup of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers – who finds herself enmeshed in a series of terrifying incidents resembling parts of her books’ plots), but A Dangerous Affair and The Art of Passion (which, like its predecessor, was filmed under a different title, The Provocateur, after a painting created by the film’s artist hero) closely parallel each other plot-wise. Both are also set in Florida – The Art of Passion was specifically set in Miami – and feature a young, unattached woman falling for a rich, handsome man, only the relationship is frustrated by an outside person who’s determined to destroy Our Heroine for reasons of their own.

In A Dangerous Affair the villainess was an insanely possessive woman who had briefly dated Our Hero and formed an obsession with him (in fact Her Obsession was A Dangerous Affair’s working title); in The Art of Passion she’s emergency room physician Dr. Hope Willliams (Katie Reese), and the person whose demented antagonism she arouses is Arnie McDougal (Gregg Weiner), abusive husband of Maggie McDougal (Christine Allocca). Dr. Williams encounters her in the ER and uses her connections to get her into a battered women’s shelter and away from her monstrous husband. The good guy in all this is James Sosa (Victor Alfieri), an Italian painter who spends a lot of time in Florida because his sister lives there – and his niece, Rita Rollins (Jessie Camacho), fortuitously is a detective with the Miami Police Department. It’s hard to believe he’s making as much money as the film says he has on his art alone – when she’s brought to his reception by her friend, African-American attorney Nina (Brandi Huzzie), she’s struck by his painting “The Provocateur,” a severe abstraction, but the starting price of $25,000 is way out of her league and the person running the show says that even artists have to eat. But Sosa is such an extensive philanthropist, endowing plenty of charities (including the shelter Dr. Williams put Mrs. McDougal in) I kept expecting an explanation from writer-director Wolf that he was an independently wealthy investor, financier or just a spoiled rich kid who had taken up painting as a hobby.

The key to the story is that while running home from work – literally: she explains that she jogs to and from the hospital because she doesn’t have time to go to a gym for normal workouts – she notices someone is following her even though she doesn’t know who it is. It’s Arnie, of course, and when she drops her phone he picks it up and is able to hack it because she never set a passcode on it. (Is it even possible to have a smartphone without setting up a passcode on it? Just asking … .) Arnie uses the phone to send fake e-mails – including one to Hope’s boss at the hospital to make it look like Hope is having an affair with her boss’s husband – and in the film’s most absurd and yet also most titillating scene, Arnie is able to film Hope and Sosa having sex (he shot from outside through their window; like Charlie Chan, Sosa and Hope should have drawn their blinds!) and tweet the footage to the entire hospital staff. The climax takes place at an out-of-the-way parcel of Florida swampland to which Sosa holds the development rights, and he and Hope go for a boat ride through the swamp on one of those odd watercraft moved by an outside propellor because one under the boat would be useless in the swamp grass. At one point Hope is scared to go in the boat because the swamp is full of alligators – and that led me to think that when Arnie inevitably followed them there and tried to attack Our Heroine, she’d push him into the swamp and the alligators would dine on his fat (but not entirely un-sexy) carcass.

No such luck: instead Arnie shows up with his baseball bat – he’d bought it, he said, to teach his daughter the game, but it had since become their weapon of choice with which to beat up his wife – and after a lot of pointless running around Hope tries to use her cell phone (which she recovered by letting herself into Arnie’s old apartment – yes, this is another Lifetime movie in which some idiot left a key under the doormat) and finds she’s in too remote an area for there to be service, in the end Sosa grabs the bat off the floor after Arnie had dropped it and clangs him over the head with it. There’s no clue as to whether Arnie survives the incident – I was expecting either a scene definitively establishing he was dead or one in which he’d be taken into custody and be seen vowing revenge – but instead Christie Will Wolf was working more like a romance novelist than a thriller writer and she couldn’t wait to get back to Sosa and Hope having yet another hot, steamy encounter. I’ll say this for Christie Will Wolf: she has a rare gift for soft-core porn – she’s got the knack to push exactly to the limits of basic cable without going over – and this time around Victor Alfieri was a much hotter, sexier male lead than Charlie Bewley, who played the role in A Dangerous Affair. Otherwise, though, The Art of Passion was just normal Lifetime sludge, getting the job done but with all too little insight or attempt to “push” the Lifetime formulae into truly interesting new directions.