Marinade

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

LIPSTICK

Directed by LAMONT JOHNSON Screenplay by DAVID RAYFIEl

Lipstick is less a movie than a marinade that the film makers obviously hope will tenderize and make palatable a tough and distinctly untasty subject. The trouble is that all the cunning they put into their saucery is of a low and painfully obvious sort.

They would have us believe that they have a serious cautionary interest in rape, its causes and consequences, but whenever there is a choice between the sober and the merely slick they opt for the easy and popular thing. To play the victim they have chosen that chic curiosity, Margaux Hemingway. With her flat voice and her tuned-out manner there is no hope of her playing anything like a typical American woman--or victim. She can only be what she is, a high-fashion model, a glamorous exotic. But that's all right. Her work gives her a logical reason to display herself, clothed and half-clothed in an erotic manner. It even supplies a certain twisted logic for the inevitable attack on her. She is, after all, a professional sex object. Why should she not attract--perhaps even seem to invite--the sadistic attention of a rapist?

As played by Chris Sarandon (the transvestite of Dog Day Afternoon), the rapist does not fit the profile of the typical sex offender, a street punk making his way up from petty theft to murder. No, he is Margaux's kid sister's music teacher, soliciting her influence to gain a hearing for his electronic compositions. Nor is his attack a brutish lunge out of the dark. The rape is strictly high fashion -- a handsome bedroom setting, the victim tied prettily with silk scarves while he sodomizes her, the whole busi ness staged and photographed with stylish prurience.

Once the case gets to court, of course, a clever defense attorney turns Margaux's profession against her, forcing her to admit that she sometimes has used impure thoughts to get herself into the mood for a sexy photograph. The jury decides at once that this modern Jez ebel led this nice-looking lad on. Poor Anne Bancroft, as the prosecutor, rails angrily, but he gets off and a week later has at the kid sister -- played by Margaux's real-life sibling Mariel, 14, who appears to have a modest natural gift for acting.

Cheap Shots. This induces a bit of temporary Charles Bronsonism. Mar gaux grabs a rifle she just happens to have with her and guns down the as sailant. This turns out to be the cheap est shot in a cheap-shot enterprise.

There she is, Papa's granddaughter, a rifle tucked coolly, familiarly against her shoulder, blasting away expertly, there by calling up the memories of machismo associated in the popular mind with the Hemingway name.

It is too clever by half, and glibness is the one approach that it is totally disastrous to take toward this subject. The film manages to treat the act of rape as if it were just another kind of S-M turn-on. One wearily concludes that like the psychopath Margaux dispatches, the pack of moral morons responsible for Lipstick probably could not stop themselves.

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