Blinded by Desires (2000 film)

Elliot Richards ( Brendan Fraser ) is a hopeless San Francisco resident with boring work and no real friends. He likes his colleague Alison Gardner ( Frances O'Connor ), but he doesn’t have the courage to ask her out. When the so-called friends leave him alone in a bar in an unsuccessful attempt to talk with Alison, he says out loud that he would do anything to be with Alison. The Devil himself ( Elizabeth Hurley ) in the guise of a beautiful woman hears his desire. She offers him seven any desires in exchange for a soul.

As you would expect from the Devil, there are tricks in any such deal. Whatever Elliot asks, the Devil fulfills the desire in such a way that Elliot does not like the result.

• As a testament, he makes Big Mac and Coca-Cola . The devil leads him to the nearest McDonald's and makes an order for Elliot, and Elliot himself has to pay, because "nothing comes of nothing."

Then the Devil takes Elliot on a black Lamborghini Diablo to his nightclub in Auckland and convinces him to sign an impressive contract before fulfilling his further desires:

1. Elliot wants to gain wealth, power and marry Alison. The devil turns him into the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar . His wife despises, twisting an affair with an English teacher . Business partners are preparing to take over the business and kill Elliot.
2. Upon learning that Alison likes emotionally sensitive men, he wants to become one. The devil makes him so sensitive that he spends most of his time crying over how beautiful the world is. Alison is quickly bored, and contrary to what she stated earlier, she openly says that she needs a man who only pretends to be sensitive, but actually wants to drag her into bed, and leaves with that.
3. Elliot wants to become a superstar athlete . The Devil makes him an indomitable two-meter basketball player , but with a tiny penis and very low intelligence (as indicated by a rather meager vocabulary), which makes Alison lose all interest in him.
4. Elliot wants to become a witty intellectual with great masculine dignity. The devil turns him into a world famous writer who turns out to be a homosexual living with another man.
5. Having abandoned personal desires, Elliot decides to do universal good and asks to make him President of the United States . The devil makes him Abraham Lincoln a few minutes before his assassination .

After each rejected desire (by dialing 666 on a pager , sometimes just before his death), Elliot returns to the Devil , who blames him for incorrectly formulating his desires, offering him to try again. These meetings take place in various places where the Devil plays a new role each time, committing various atrocities - dissolving schoolchildren without homework, replacing medicines in the hospital with sweets (claiming to be a placebo ), resetting the parking meters to zero, and writing down fines for unpaid parking lot. The roles she plays (teacher, nurse, policeman and cheerleader ) are typical of male sexual fantasies. In one of the carved scenes, she is also dressed in a traditional French maid outfit.

In the end, Elliot returns to work, deciding to think before making his last two wishes. But the Devil observes that his request for Big Mac and Coca-Cola is considered one of the desires, that is, he has only one thing left.

Trying to ask God for help, Elliot confesses to the priest, who calls the police, and Elliot is taken to the station. The sergeant on duty puts him in a cell, and the Devil (in the form of a policeman) takes him away. In the detention cell, Elliot meets with a mysterious stranger ( Gabriel Caseus ), later it turns out that it is the Lord himself, who explains to him that a person simply cannot sell his soul, since it belongs to God . Elliot returns to the Devil and asks her to cancel the contract. When she disagrees, Elliot refuses to use her last wish. But since there is a temporary restriction on the fulfillment of desires, the Devil in a rage teleports himself and him to Hell , where she turns first into a black horned monster, and then into a huge woman with a pitchfork. When the Devil forces him to utter his last wish, Elliot blurts out that his last wish is for Alison to be happy. The Devil sighs heavily and breaks up into millions of pieces, and Elliot falls into the abyss of Hell. He wakes up on a marble staircase, believing that he is in Paradise . The Devil appears and explains that this is a courthouse (it is being visited by future clients - lawyers), and that under the terms of the contract (which no one ever reads), selfless desire cancels the deal, so that Elliot’s soul no longer belongs to her.

Before breaking up, Elliot admits that he became friends with the Devil, despite her manipulations, which she does not dispute. She only answers that the classic battle between God and the Devil is a props. In the end, Paradise and Hell can be found on Earth itself - the choice is people. By this, the Devil may be hinting that she is a companion of God sent to tempt people in order to guide them on the true path. This hint at the end of the film is confirmed by the friendly chess game of the Devil and God (despite the fact that she is trying to replace the pieces while her opponent does not look at the board).

Elliot, having gathered courage, comes to Alison and invites her on a date, but she replies that she already has a boyfriend (which, probably, was the fulfillment of Elliot's last wish). He gracefully accepts the refusal, returns to his life and meets a new neighbor, Nicole Delarusso (also played by Francis O'Connor), whom he begins to meet.

• Blinded by desires (film, 1967)

• Blinded by Desires on the Internet Movie Database
• Blinded by Desires movie trailer on YouTube
• Exler's Note