The film opens a Pandora's box of forbidden pleasures, linking a marginally acceptable guilty fantasy-running wild in a department store-to a much darker and more sinister one, that of having a license to kill.

As he films Seattle, transforming it into "Rain City," Rudolph is faced with the same decision: is he a realist or an expressionist, inventing the world or recording it? The moral and the aesthetic questions merge, as they must on the higher levels of art.

The dance that never quite materializes becomes the perfect correlative to the relationships that never quite settle down as Rudolph's characters drift through his crisscross cutting.

what matters for Ruiz is the beautiful blurrings of sense that his story creates.

infelicitous

A dead man is a man who has lost; for the others, the struggle goes on.

It is impossible to extrapolate a single, definite point of view from them: they seem to demand that we look everywhere at once, be everywhere at once.

Ruiz's images shake our security.

Passion is a movie that always feels "in between"-moving away from some crucial point we haven't seen and toward another we never will.