Fifty Shades Darker

Love, Negotiated in a Grey Area

I keep coming back to the first thing Fifty Shades Darker understands, even if it doesn’t always know what to do with it: romance, at least as cinema imagines it, is often a matter of bargaining. Not courtship. Not destiny.

Bargaining. James Foley’s film, the middle chapter of E.L. James’s billion-selling phenomenon brought back to the screen after the 2015 original, is less interested in seduction than in terms and conditions.

Who gets to ask for what. Who has the leverage. Who says yes because they mean it, and who says yes because they’re afraid of losing the person in front of them.

That sounds bloodless on paper, but Foley plays it with a surprising amount of mood: polished surfaces, soft light, expensive apartments, and a strange, nearly comic solemnity about sexual restraint.

For a sequel in a series already famous for being talked about more than watched, the movie’s most interesting move is to become a little less absurdly punished by its own premise. The first Fifty Shades was a story about appetite disguised as prudery. This one is about damage — or, more exactly, the awkward social choreography of damaged people trying to make love look sustainable.

That’s a richer subject than the movie can fully manage, but I admired its stubborn commitment to treating commitment itself as a site of drama. I’m not entirely sure it always earns that seriousness. Sometimes it seems to believe that a moody close-up and a rain-soaked skyline can substitute for emotional complexity.

Still, the film has a faint pulse, and that’s enough to keep it from becoming mere furniture polish.

Foley isn’t an obvious choice for this material, which is part of why the film is mildly more watchable than it has any right to be. His best-known work tends to involve pressure systems — Glengarry Glen Ross, Fear, The Chamber — stories where people circle each other with bad intentions or desperate needs. He brings a similar interest here, except the menace has been domesticated into upscale erotic melodrama.

That’s a weird fit, but not an uninteresting one. He shoots the apartment interiors like a luxury catalog with a secret. Mirrors, frosted glass, clean lines, low lamps.

The world of the film is all controlled reflection, which makes sense for a story in which the characters are constantly trying to see themselves through the other person’s gaze. Christian Grey’s money still functions like a spell, but the movie is smarter when it treats money as insulation. He can buy privacy, control, anonymity.