FEMALE PERVERSIONS (56)

Directed by: Susan Streitfeld

Starring: Tilda Swinton, Amy Madigan, Karen Sillas

The Pitch: A successful woman lawyer is troubled by bad dreams, unpleasant memories, and a difficult relationship with her sister.

Theo Sez: Intelligent, powerfully-detailed feminist meditation, though its thesis (not a wholly inappropriate word) doesn't seem to go a great deal beyond Naomi Wolf's "Beauty Myth", dealing with women's body-obsession and their fear (incited and manipulated by a male-chauvinist media culture) that beauty and power are incompatible, matriarchy seen as the province of fat, hideous crones. Though an opening caption speaks of social stereotypes constraining women it's clear that the film (to its credit) sees them less as victims than as self-oppressed - even the masked patriarch who tyrannizes our heroine in her nightmares is revealed as having female breasts ; the villains of the piece are (at least partly) women themselves, too busy primping their bodies for male approval to ever attain their full potential, let alone peace of mind. It's intriguing stuff, especially given that the film looks good - in discreetly-lit, slightly underpopulated American-indie fashion - and isn't without humour, both satirical (intra-female office politics expressed in dissing each other's lipstick) and just plain quirky (translating the French name of said lipstick as "The Red Pussycat", a salesgirl suddenly miaows lustily). The only problem is that it doesn't seem to have any life outside of itself - everything is geared towards The Theme, most of the characters no more than vessels for various points the writer-director wants to make (most painfully - in every sense - in the character of the 13-year-old girl who abuses her body with a carving-knife, symbol of uncorrupted (if terminally confused) youth rejecting society's pernicious messages about Beauty and Femininity). It's a successful film, but in the end you have to wonder if it actually reflects women's experience of the world - or only self-conscious women's.