Quid Pro Quo

You wouldn't expect a modern-day thriller about wannabe paraplegics to evoke Hitchcock's classic Rear Window, would you? And you might not expect to be quite so drawn into this dark romance between a semi-paralyzed journalist and a mercurial, leggy blonde who desperately wants to live her life in a wheelchair.

As the name would imply, Quid Pro Quo is about exchanges. Radio journalist Isaac Knott gets a tip from someone calling herself Ancient Chinese Girl about a man who tries to pay a doctor to amputate his otherwise healthy leg. When that leads to a dead end, she emails him a tip about where "they" meet — who they are, he finds, are the wannabes, the people who want to be amputated, paralyzed, bound to wheelchairs. They look upon him with fear and envy, and flee into the night from his gentle questions. When he finally meets his tipster, he discovers that Ancient Chinese Girl is a gorgeous, '50s-style blonde with a penchant for stilettos. Fiona, played by Vera Farmiga, demands to know more about his condition, deferring his questions about the wannabes and her "friend" who is like them in exchange for details about life in a wheelchair. His investigation soon turns into a smoldering romance, with Fiona revealing herself to him piece by piece.

While some might find the literal subject matter of Quid Pro Quo offensive — I found it surprising that Isaac was not angrier, actually, by the notion of people who declared him "perfect" when he couldn't even hail a cab in the rain — the emotional subtext is about vulnerability, fear, aloneness, and of course, paralysis. In one scene, Fiona exclaims, "I already am paralyzed; I'm just trapped in a waking person's body!" Vera Farmiga's Fiona is terrifying and mystifying; she easily reveals herself to Isaac in a medical corset and Milwaukee braces and launches herself at his mouth, then tries to laughingly shrug off his gentle rejection. She revels in being wheelchair-bound and is ecstatic when she has the opportunity to do so in public for the first time. In one scene I thought she was going to drive a car into a tree. Nick Stahl's occasionally wry, understated performance is good but can't really compete with a meaty character like Fiona.

The filtered amber light of twilight that infuses most of the scenes does, as Farmiga said in a recent interview with Premiere, make a topic that some might find unpalatable easier to deal with. The brutally bright colors in other scenes are as jarring as the car accident that left Isaac paralyzed so long ago. One of the more stunning scenes was the slow dance between Fiona and Isaac in their wheelchairs; she bumps into his so he rolls back into his apartment, and they go back and forth until she leaps out of her chair and pushes him onto the bed for their first love scene.

Old-fashioned wingtip shoes, a mysterious concoction that Fiona wants Isaac to use on her, her corset and leg braces, and of course the wheelchairs take on talismanic properties in this movie, where people want to be "cured" of their wholeness; where no one is the sum of their parts. Quid Pro Quo doesn't try to answer Fiona's question, "What makes a person want to be paralyzed who isn't?" And the ending isn't simplistic or easy. It's the end of a sort of dream; it's recovery. Fans of strange love stories and detective thrillers would do well to investigate this indie gem from first-time writer/director Carlos Brooks.