Starring Catherine McCormack, Rufus Sewell, Marshall Herskovitz Directed by Jonathan Darby Rated R, with profanity, nudity, sexuality and violence Running time 110 minutes Jack gives this film a rating of 9 out of 10

By Marshall Fine
Gannett News Service

(March 6, 1997) -- To some people, nothing is more frightening than a smart woman. To others, nothing is more attractive.

So discovers Veronica Franco, a courtesan in 16th-century Venice in Marshall Herskovitz's new film, Dangerous Beauty. The title refers to Veronica herself, who has the brains to go with her considerable physical attributes and quickly learns how to use both.

Herskovitz's film is intoxicatingly sexy, even as it offers intellectual stimulation and provocative ideas. A visual throwback to the costume dramas of an earlier Hollywood, it is a resolutely modern movie, using its Renaissance period to illuminate contemporary ideas about the roles into which society forces women.

Dangerous Beauty blends sex, love, lust and history in a dazzling, heady mix. When was the last time you saw a movie that celebrated a character's ability -- Veronica's -- to compose extemporaneous poetry in the middle of a sword fight (with the exception of Cyrano de Bergerac)?

Veronica (Catherine McCormack), the daughter of a wise but poor woman (Jacqueline Bisset), loves the well-born Marco (Rufus Sewell) but is broken-hearted when he admits he cannot marry her because his family requires a more politically advantageous union.

As Veronica's mother tells her, "Marriage is a contract, not a perpetual tryst." Veronica's revenge, her mother teaches her, is to become a courtesan: someone who can be Marco's lover without having to deal with the duties of being a wife.

She educates Veronica in both the knowledge of the world and the ways of men, teaching her to become the woman that the men of Venice turn to for stimulation -- both physical and mental -- when their wives begin to bore them.

Based on the biography, The Honest Courtesan, Dangerous Beauty eventually veers into a war between Italy and the Ottoman empire, as well as the arrival of bubonic plague and the Spanish Inquisition in Venice. At its heart, however, it is about the efforts by Veronica to win both Marco's love and respect as an equal. She is on a quest to control her own destiny at a time when most women couldn't even read.

Herskovitz and cinematographer Bojan Bazelli create a sumptuous canvas on which to tell this story. In McCormack and Sewell they have a stunning couple to fill the central roles. Together, these two strike sparks that threaten to set the screen ablaze.

I can't vouch for the period authenticity of some of the explicit Anglo-Saxonisms these English-accented Italians bandy about, but I can attest to both the heat and the romance that Dangerous Beauty generates in great, generous waves. Where was this movie on Valentine's Day?