Ah yes the joys of streaming media. They sometimes lead me to pick movies I probably wouldn't normally choose to watch--probably because it is so easy to stop and pick a different one, if the first one just isn't working out. That's how I stumbled across this beauty: Female Perversions, directed by Susan Streitfeld and loosely based on Louise Kaplan's book of the same name. It stars Tilda Swinton as a very strange "career woman" and quite a few other fairly well-known actresses. The movie plays around with the notion that - to quote from the Publishers Weekly blurb on the amazon website:
"women's perversions parody feminine gender ideals of innocence and submission, while men's perversions express forbidden and shameful feminine impulses."
The film focuses only on the women's side of this--and tries to tell a story or fable about what happens to women, because of all these perversions they are all condemned to perform. In order to convey some of the main theoretical tenets of the book, one finds slogans from it in the background, as graffiti and I think the above is another example of this--the ad slogan sounds like it could be another one from the book. I found this aspect rather clumsy. The whole film is rather clumsy in fact - not uninteresting - Swinton is always interesting to watch, but I did not really become invested in these characters or their lives. To be completely honest I've tried watching it twice now and have yet to make it through to the end. Maybe I'll go back and see what happens--if it's something interesting I'll let you know....
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