The Boston Globe Friday, May 9, 1997 'Female Perversions': potent stew of sexual politics By Jay Carr, Globe Staff

 

Far from the realm of kinky porn its title might suggest to some, Susan Streitfeld's "Female Perversions" is one of the richest, most idea-filled, most stylish and most powerfully acted films of the year. Unless you're aware that the title comes from Louise Kaplan's Freudian text, subtitled "The Temptations of Emma Bovary," you might not know that "Female Perversions" is a deliberate needling of male supremacy. With men calling the shots and making the rules, any female endeavor not cut to men's specifications is - by male definition - perverse. This explains why Tilda Swinton's brilliantly mercurial self-starter is also a self-stopper. She's conflicted, her sexuality at odds with her social conditioning.

Swinton, the swanny madonna of so many Derek Jarman films, plays a highly successful lawyer sweating out an appointment as a judge. Although a professional juggernaut, she's very insecure, second-guessing herself incessantly. When the boundaries of her life begin crumbling, she hurls herself into an affair with Karen Sillas's thoughtful psychiatrist, who works in her building. Although Swinton appears to have it all, her on-and-off affair with a male architect is immediately endangered the moment he can't have things his way. She's pinioned on the classic dominance-submissiveness polarity. Worse, her even more confused graduate-student sister, played by Amy Madigan, is arrested for shoplifitng in the desert town where she's holed up - her response to feelings of anxiety or deprivation.

Swinton's bright, edgy lawyer and the other women in the film either are camouflaging their desires, pretending to run their lives along male-oriented lines to get in on the power wielding, or rebelling. Even when yielding to temptations to fetishize her appearance, or scarfing down M&Ms, Swinton remains simultaneously elegant, febrile, and strong. The others, although not required to negotiate the flip-flops Swinton's character undergoes, inhabit their characters flavorfully, too. These include Laila Robbins, playing the submissive but miserable landlady of the kleptomaniac sister, and Frances Fisher's manipulative stripper. She doesn't see that her arousal techniques limit and imprison her even more than the men she uses them on.

Dream influences verge on the obvious, and the entire film flirts with a too overtly academic slant. Ultimately, though, the self-empowerment theme of "Female Perversions" comes through loud and clear, even before an ending in which Swinton's lawyer reaches out to an adolescent girl fighting the changes in her body. The film succeeds in turning what could merely have been a handful of case histories into felt knowledge of hysteria, dysfunction, self-destructiveness - and, finally, sexual politics and healing, as the sisters examine their respective ways of trying to acquire the power they associate with their dominating father. Don't miss Swinton in the sometimes cathartic, consistently engrossing, always empathetic "Female Perversions." She's magnificent as a woman unaware of what a power of nature she is.

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