A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Showing posts with label Susan Streitfeld. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Susan Streitfeld. Show all posts

Saturday, July 26, 2025

Female Perversions (Susan Streitfeld, 1996)

Tilda Swinton in Female Perversions

Cast: Tilda Swinton, Amy Madigan, Karen Sillas, Frances Fisher, Clancy Brown, Laila Robins, John Diehl, Paulina Porizkova, Dale Shuger. Screenplay: Julie Hébert, Susan Streitfeld, based on a book by Louise J. Kaplan. Cinematography: Teresa Medina. Production design: Missy Stewart. Film editing: Curtiss Clayton, Leo Trombetta. Music: Debbie Wiseman. 

Susan Streitfeld's Female Perversions lays on its theme with a trowel: The complaisance of women pervades and perverts their lives, from the beginning when the lawyer Eve Stephens (Tilda Swinton) submits to the male gaze of a panel of judges through the somewhat ambiguous revelations about her father to the conclusion when she rescues a girl from her own self-disgust. It's unabashedly a feminist fable -- not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just that Eve's story (yes, we get the name) is involving enough to embody the theme without an overlay of obvious symbolism and the surreal exploration of her dreams and fantasies. Still, the film might be what we need when men in power are trying to restore the straight rich white man as our normative figure.

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