Anything would be preferable to Six Degrees’ overupholstered cocoon, where sadism is socking a tapestried pillow and masochism is smiling when someone spills wine on the Chinese rug.

As the textured interior began to fill up with fatuous sallies between the dealer and his wife, I began to long for Hollywood’s old, salacious take on the art world. Trying to sell a painting out of all that ambience would be as futile as competing for a piece of raw meat in a shark tank. The place looks like the inside of a sack of potpourri. Unfortunately, from the opening shots of the dealer’s Fifth Avenue apartment, I got the heebie-jeebies. Nor was there even anything to indicate that the dealer’s animating principle was to be sadism ( Body of Evidence), masochism ( 9 1/2 Weeks), felony (Terence Stamp in Legal Eagles), or screaming bias (Bronson Pinchot in Beverly Hills Cop).

Here at last was a film with an art-dealer protagonist played neither by Madonna ( Body of Evidence) nor Kim Basinger ( 9 1/2 Weeks). To tell the truth, I had high hopes for the movie. A clammy rot sets in, and the theatrical artifice turns morally toxic under its celluloid sheen. As a movie, Six Degrees relentlessly yaks at you. As theater, the equation played with a tipsy logic, topical daring and comic invention striking a balance that offset the plot’s conventional pieties. He merely, desperately, lived out his fantasy in the midst of other people’s superior reality.

The story is true in its essentials-it was reported with great gusto by the New York Times hack in the mid ’80s-and there was never any doubt that the young man was guilty of misrepresentation and psychological trespass but, as in the play, he neither stole nor inflicted bodily harm. The play’s premise concerns a young man who claims to be the son of Sidney Poitier in order to insinuate himself into an affluent urban household, which, as a result of his intrusion, is politely but irrevocably shattered. That the scary plight of the hustling black antihero is left willfully unresolved in order to serve up an epiphany of conscience to its careless white heroine caused nary a whisper of discontent. On Broadway, where it ran like a Restoration comedy on poppers, the messier social issues of John Guare’s play were folded in on themselves-as if a perfect sheet of dough covered everything with a creamy ubiquitousness. There is something morally anemic about Six Degrees of Separation.

9 degrees of separation