Business of strangers

Good actors need great breaks in order to become A-list stars. Stockard Channing, whose movie career began in 1971, has done very well on Broadway and US TV (her own sitcoms and The West Wing), but her first big lead role in Grease (at 33, playing a teenager) may have typecast the vivacious show-stopper. Only one later film earned her Golden Globe or Oscar nominations (Six Degrees of Separation, 1993). She gained less kudos for The Business of Strangers in 2001: the indie psycho-sexual mystery cost six million dollars and only grossed one million.

It was the Sundance-backed debut feature of writer-director Patrick Stettner, an award-winning student film-maker, who has only directed one more feature, The Night Listener (2006), another over-talkative psychological thriller (starring Robin Williams, co-written by Stettner with the story's originator, novelist Armistead Maupin). Apart from a credited "thanks", among many, on 2010's Oscar-nominated Winter Bones, he's had no IMDb entry since then.

Short in stature but high in eyeball appeal, Channing has an unforgettable face and charisma. She's a dedicated, divorced corporate executive unexpectedly promoted to CEO, over-nighting in a deluxe hotel suite. Her new multi-tattooed technical assistant (Julia Stiles) was late for a meeting, got fired, is stuck at the airport, and ends up talking to Channing's regretful character in the hotel bar. So does the self-assured male head-hunter (Frederick Weller) Channing had summoned when she thought she was going to be fired. It turns out that Chiles knows his rapist history, Channing believes her, and they drug, tie up and strip him, writing his sins on his skin (maybe Stettner had read a Swedish trilogy's first instalment).

The barely believable parcel of coincidences could have led to a psycho-sexual kaleidoscope revealing lesbian and gender-bending tensions, if the screenplay and two-thirds of the three-part acting team had been stronger cinematic elements.

Stiles does pinch-eyed tight-lipped meanness well enough, but Stettner lets her do it all the time, without developing her proclaimed role as a non-fiction writer enjoying the "sloppiness" of real life. Her manipulation of the older couple isn't credible, and neither is TV actor Weller's ill-defined character as a plaything for angry females.

When she's in focus, Channing projects a frisson into the static scenes, her eyes darting, seemingly looking for meat on the writer-director's bare bones of a plot. At 75 minutes, it's a cinematic novella of inconsequence.