A healthy budget, a Parisian setting, and an experienced producer — Dave ponders why Sandy Whitelaw and Stephen O’Shea’s patchy erotic thriller sank without a trace.

It was way back in 1985 when Stephen O’Shea began his creative partnership with Sandy Whitelaw.

O’Shea had graduated from university in Paris, lectured for a few years, and then moved into journalism.

Whitelaw, on the other hand, had been on the filmmaking frontline since the ‘50s. Working as an assistant to producer David O. Selznick on A Farewell to Arms (1957), he held a similar position with Ray Stark a decade later. By the ‘70s, Whitelaw found himself at United Artists: first as the West Coast executive, and then as Head of Production for their European arm. It was here that he oversaw some of the continent’s most exciting cinema, such as Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972), Fellini’s Roma (1972), and Pasolini’s The Decameron (1971).

With wildly different backgrounds, you’d be permitted to be confused over how they both crossed paths. The answer, though, is subtitling. Over the course of several decades, Whitelaw provided English subtitles for over one-thousand foreign language films — and for two periods totalling eight years, O’Shea was his wingman.

“It was a lucrative side hustle,” laughs O’Shea. “We worked alongside such directors as Blier, Rohmer, Varda, Kassovitz, Lanzmann and many others. I was also a critic of French cinema for Variety at the time. Sandy spoke many languages; me, just English and French.”

Considering the sort of European cinema they were privy to, it’s perhaps surprising that, when O’Shea and Whitelaw (as scripter and director, respectively) were given the chance to make a feature together, it was something as unconventional and odd as VICIOUS CIRCLES (1997).

Andrea (Carolyn Lowery) and Dylan (Paul Hipp) are both lovers and half-siblings. Dylan has ambitions to be a chef, with opening his own restaurant the endgame to an intense course under the lecherous eye of a French cookery genius (Stephan Meldegg). Alas, his lack of finances are standing in the way of his dream — so with desperate times calling for desperate measures, he takes a backhander for smuggling the latest trendy drug, Heaven 7, into the country but gets caught doing so. Banged up in prison, it’s down to wannabe model Andrea to raise some cash for his defence, so she enrols into an underground call girl ring called The Circle that’s led by Conrad March (Ben Gazzara): a decadent eccentric whose very particular peccadillos may have just met their match…

“Mostly, it was Sandy’s story, reflecting his idiosyncrasies,” remembers O’Shea. “The idea had been kicking around for a few years, but it stalled when we couldn’t figure out how to spring the male lead from prison. The logjam broke when we met with a consular official from the American Embassy in Paris, just round the corner from our office. He told us that most Americans in French prisons were there on drug smuggling charges, the great preponderance of whom were elderly people who took the chance of being a drug mule in order to earn a windfall and improve their meagre retirement income. And that the French were draconian about drug cases: the only way a prisoner could be released for a half-day was to attend the funeral of an immediate family member. We had our answer. Our protagonist would escape attending the funeral of his sister!”

Billed as an erotic thriller, Vicious Circles is more a feature of all genres yet a master of none. Flirting with drama, dystopian nightmare, jet black comedy, and continental arthouse, its identity was no doubt the reason it was met with apathy by audiences. Produced by Nik Powell and Stephen Woolley (“I believe Sandy knew Stephen well, and he helped with the financing”), the sight of a misty Parisian horizon in the opening shot is all you need to know that there’s a quality to this picture as well as a healthy budget backing it. A surprise, then, to learn that it debuted in a twilight showing on the Hot Choice PPV channel as a warm-up act for Fred Olen Ray’s mighty Masseuse 2 (1997). There’s no shame in that — but it does give some idea as to how drastically it missed its target audience.

Did it deserve more? Possibly. As mentioned, there’s an inherent luxury to this piece of work thanks to craftsmen like cinematographer Romain Wilding and composer Robert Lockhart. Blended with the Gallic vistas, there are moments when it feels like you’ve stumbled upon a lost classic of ‘90s cinema. But then there are also moments — Andrea having her pubic hair forcibly removed by a swarm of locusts in a bell jar, for example — when you realise that Vicious Circles is an arthouse misfire with a perverted sense of humour.

Such frivolities conjure a pang of regret from O’Shea:

“Yes, I think the locust/pubic hair scene might have earned it a stricter rating than it otherwise merited. We got some flak about that, including from female members of the film crew!”

Lowery only made a fleeting appearance on film, so casting her as the lead was a bold decision. It pays off. She’s astonishingly attractive and tackles this nudity-filled role with a cocksure arrogance that suits her character. Hipp is a good match for her, and Jerome Davis deserves the plaudits. A stage actor by trade, Davis’ stiff and proper diplomatic consul is the perfect eye in the centre of Andrea’s X-rated storm.

The tagline for Vicious Circles reads “I don’t take risks, they take me”. You can’t help but feel it’s an allegory for Whitelaw and O’Shea.

Neither wrote or directed again.

Instead, they were swallowed up by the film business for a wild and ambitious gamble that nobody really got.