Richard Freeman's Batteries Not Included
Female Perversions
by Arthur Winfield Knight

I considered going to see Night Falls On Manhattan, but decided I didn't want to see another gangster film. I wasn't sure I wanted to see Susan Streitfeld's Female Perversions, either, which deals with a woman on the verge of a breakdown. I thought it would probably be a cross between John Cassavetes' Woman Under The Influence and Diary Of A Man Housewife, but I was wrong; Perversions is much closer to Roman Polanski's Repulsion.

Streitfeld, like Polanski, fills her film with Freudian symbols, but while Polanski somehow manages to make them terrifying, Streitfeld just makes them boring, pretentious and, well, corny. (There are numerous shots of tightropes, razor blades, lipstick tubes and knives.)

Streitfeld has a message, and she wants to be sure we get it. She begins Female Perversions with a long quotation by Louise J. Kaplan, which says "normal femininity" is a "perversion" in our society. Streitfeld operates on the premise that she's really discovered something, but she'd have been a lot better off if she'd followed the dictum of the movie mogul who told his writers to send any "messages" they might have by Western Union, But Streitfeld keeps hammering away; slogans such as "Perversion scenarios are about desperate need" appear on billboards and the benches at bus stops.

The main character in Streitfeld's film is a woman named Eve Stephens (Tilda Swinton). She's being considered for a judgeship by the governor, and she's apprehensive about it, even though she's good at manipulating people. In the early scene we see her in the courtroom, and her body movement is designed to make people more aware of her sexuality than her remarks. But there's a lot of sex in Female Perversions; given the film's title, I suppose that shouldn't surprise anyone, although the film's curiously non-erotic.

Eve lets a boyfriend shave her vagina in his office, and she has a brief affair with a lesbian psychiatrist (Karen Sillas), but the sex seems joyless, probably because Eve always imagines herself in bondage while she's making love. There's also a crotch shot that's a lot more graphic than the one Sharon Stone became famous for in Basic Instinct, and there's a scene where a stripper (Frances Fisher) dances for some women, in her negligee, showing them how to "turn a man on." (I think most directors have their characters dance when they don't know what else to do; I can imagine Streitfeld, who co-wrote the script with Julie Hebert, saying, "We can't just have these women sitting around. It's too boring.") One could convincingly argue that Perversions is ultimately about control, and there's even a control parable about women.

Eve's sister, Madelyn (Amy Madigan), is a shop-lifter who is completing her Ph. D. Her dissertation deals with a small Mexican village where "the women rule." As a result, Madelyn claims, all the women are "fat, which is what happens in a matriarchy." Somehow the message seems cryptic in a film with a feminist sensibility, but there's a lot that's cryptic in Perversions.

Madelyn says she steals because it's an "erotic" experience. Maybe so. She certainly looks happier in the scenes where she's stealing than her sister does in the scenes where she's having sex. But the most cryptic thing about Perversions is one of the characters.

Ed (Dale Shuiger) is a young tomboy who wanders around in the desert each evening with a flashlight. Ed wears loose-fitting tops, as if she wants to hide the fact that she's a woman, and she cuts the word "love" into her right leg with a knife. She also "buries" her "lost baby" in the desert each month after she has her period. At the end of the film she climbs up a rocky slope, followed by Eve, and you get the idea Ed might commit suicide, even though you don't know why. Eve sits next to Ed, holding her, and the film inexplicably ends.

I left the theater wondering what Ed's function was, but much of Female Perversions is imponderable. I don't know why Eve was so intrigued by a photograph of a woman with iguanas in her hair, and I don't know why Eve cuts her right breast with a razor blade. Besides the fact that women have a hard time, what's it all supposed to mean?

I haven't been so confused since my second wife went mad in Riverside, reading Swedenborg, and asking if I thought there were angels in trees.

I should have gone to see the gangster movie.