Female Perversions . Metro Pulse . 07-27-98

Female Perversions

DIRECTED BY: Susan Streitfeld

REVIEWED: 07-27-98

The word "perversion" is one of those cultural artifacts—like "taboo"—that used to mean a lot more than it does now. Not long ago, practicing something like oral sex was enough to get you labeled mentally unsound. These days, it doesn't even put a dent in your poll standing.

So what's a perversion in the 1990s? About seven years ago, feminist scholar Louise J. Kaplan wrote a tome arguing that for women, perversions are anything they're forced into by coping with life in a patriarchy. Director Susan Streitfeld borrowed Kaplan's ideas and shaped them into a movie with the same title as Kaplan's book: Female Perversions (1996, R). It's an interesting film and more entertaining than you'd expect, but it's ultimately kind of annoying. Tilda Swinton, who's making a career of movies about gender (Othello, Edward II), does a nice turn as the heroine, a lawyer not-so-subtly named Eve. Her high-stakes career—including a looming judgeship nomination—is jeopardized when her artsy philosopher sister Madelyn (Amy Madigan) is arrested for shoplifting. In scenes both slyly real and dreamily surreal, the film sets up and deconstructs stereotypes of female behavior. But a handful of great moments—a study of body language in a courtroom, a young adolescent symbolically fighting her menstruation—are undercut by the movie's contradictions. It ultimately suggests that since men control society, it's impossible for women to do anything that arises from themselves. That statement of powerlessness seems every bit as proscriptive as the constraints it rails against.

--Jesse Fox Mayshark

Full Length Reviews
Female Perversions
Female Perversions
Female Perversions
Female Perversions

Film Vault Suggested Links
Angels and Insects
Exotica
Crash

Rate this Film
If you don't want to vote on a film yet, and would like to know how others voted, leave the rating selection as "Vote Here" and then click the Cast Vote button.