Female Perversions
Susan Streitfeld, USA/Germany, 1996, 113 mins; (Entertainment Video)
Review by Gerald Houghton (1997)
Many a dirty Mac enticed by the deliberately provocative title of Susan Streitfeld’s debut will abruptly scurry exit-wards once its wearer cottons on. This is, whisper it in dark corners, a feminist tract adapted from Louise J Kaplan’s formidable book, a lengthy quote from which hangs on the front of the movie lest you be in any doubt: for women today, it says, conventional notions of femininity are perversions in themselves. We are led to this through Eve (the luminous Tilda Swinton), an attorney about to be interviewed for a vacant Los Angeles judge-ship. She power-dresses, playing up to the short skirts and fashionable lip-sticks her peers expect. But Eve is a fake, plagued by the masochistic fantasies she plays-out with lover Clancy Brown, and drawn into an affair with the psychiatrist Renee (Karen Silas), who moves into her building. Eve’s dysfunctional family also exercise a powerful grip. When Madelyn is arrested, Eve journeys to the matriarchal desert community where she lives - and thus into the lie of herself .
Female Perversions is not entirely successful. Certainly in the beginning there is an uneasiness of tone that throws Streitfeld’s audience off-beam as Swinton stalks the screen in revealing lingerie, heckled by hackneyed (bedsheet-toga porn) dream sequences. The dialogue, like the interiors, is coldly minimalist. The film certainly doesn’t welcome us; in the opening court scene Eve’s astute attacks are blunted by the leery misogyny of male on-lookers. This however, like Madelyn’s lacy, marriage-obsessed landlady (Laila Robins), gradually points up the self-oppression central to Streitfeld’s debate.
Muse-in-chief to the late Derek Jarman, Swinton is magnificent. Female Perversions marks her US debut (accent and all), one seized with a remorseless emotional and physical nakedness. (Streitfeld lost count of the number of American actresses - Debra Winger, for one - who turned her down.) Swinton’s features are few and far between, but difficult to fault or ignore. On the minus side, Streitfeld’s style is occasionally off-putting, too cold to hold our attentions. The piece never quite adds up to more than the sum of its considerable parts. At its best though - a woozy, drunken night in the desert, a surreal, anarchic party in a police station - the film comes on like David Lynch meeting Hal Hartley. Debbie Wiseman’s cello-driven score is an unqualified triumph.
Strange, difficult, occasionally even ridiculous; a runaway juggernaut of ideas. Flawed, but for most of its (short) 113 minutes, it’s riveting.