Director/co-writer Susan Streitfeld's provocative new film Female Perversion focuses on Eve Stephens to look at the pressures women face in trying to achieve female erotic power. The other women in Eve's life are equally troubled. There is Madelyn (Amy Madigan), Eve's frumpy sister who is about to finish a Ph.D. but can't control her compulsion to shoplift. Emma (Laila Robins), Madelyn's roommate, is dominated by no-good boyfriends who always leave her in emotional shambles. Emma's sister Annunciata (Frances Fisher) is a stripper who proclaims femininity to be a lifelong effort. Edwina (Dale Shuger), Emma's adolescent daughter, sees how all these women handle their sexuality and dreads her coming maturity. Profoundly feminist in its approach, Female Perversion's premise is that the essence of the erotic is based on submission and domination, be it of an emotional, physical or intellectual nature.

At first, because of the impressionistic flashes the film shows of Eve's disturbing dreams and fears, it seems the movie might be a chronicle of a descent into madness or Eve's coming to grips with a childhood sexual trauma like incest. But both overused dramatic devices are thankfully not in use. Instead, the film turns the volume up--way up--on the normal anxieties that all women have about their femininity and their sexuality.

What the film doesn't tell its audience (fortunately the press kit does) is that the premise of the film is based on a work of nonfiction by psychiatrist Louise J. Kaplan. The book, a series of case studies, looks at how women cope with societal and family conditioning in their search to find and hold a strong sexual identity. This knowledge makes the film infinitely more interesting, as the narrative is not particularly driven by major plot developments. Instead, each moment becomes a meditation on power and how all the women cope with the differentials they experience.

But the great literally unseen force--made most conspicuous by its very absence--is of the ultimate sign of female sexuality, the vagina. Full frontal nudity in such a feminist film would undoubtedly have garnered the picture a staunch NC-17, so instead we get a lot of tits and ass. As a cultural phenomenon reflecting the realities of the motion picture industry, the absence is merely ironically interesting, but within the strict context of the film, the effect creates a jarring dissonance--the female audience isn't allowed to view the crux of their gendered identity, even in a work that explicitly addresses their sexual repression.

Nevertheless, it is the visuals that ultimately make the film work. The scenes of Eve's internal psychic fears are particularly disturbing, forcing the audience to ponder standards of physical beauty and safety. Female Perversion is an interesting meditation on feminine sexuality and power, but its real success is in its compelling representation.