Female Perversions (1997)

Where's The Perversions ?

I watched this movie on the Logo channel. They may have taken some parts out I don't know.

Or let me say I hope they took some parts out. If this was the entire contents of the movie they need to add some parts in.

It starts out ok with this cute girl who's a lawyer and other nice looking girls in that same building.

Almost immediately she starts having hallucinations about people who aren't real that sneak up behind her and choke her, etc..

Ok it's getting better I'm thinking.

But it never gets past that point. It just gets bogged down in a lot of symbolism that doesn't mean anything (at least to me).

You've got the kleptomaniac sister who steals for sexual thrills. The little boy who carves words into his skin. The model / stipper. Etc.

Quite a few of the scenes are nightmares. More symbolism.

Then there's the repressed memories from childhood. You always need some of those in a movie like this I guess. That's another mystery that is never explained.

The main character has a few relationships going with both sexes. Those dissolve and she is left wallowing in her nightmares out in the desert where the little boy has created a shrine composed of manicans.

I guess the idea is this gal is on her way up the corporate ladder professionally but she lost something along the way and is trying to find it again.

Jeff Marzano

Loving Annabelle
December 13, 2007

Louise J. Kaplan

For a woman to explore and express the fullness of her sexuality, her emotional and intellectual capacities, would entail who knows what risks and who knows what truly revolutionary alteration of the social conditions that demean and constrain her.

Or she may go on trying to fit herself into the order of the world and thereby consign herself forever to the bondage of some stereotype of normal femininity - a perversion, if you will.

Louise J. Kaplan

I gave this DVD 5 stars because I liked the movie. April 21, 2006

Tilda Swinton is the simply the best

I would have to disagree with some of the other review comments made earlier. Tilda is great for the role and played it well. Her ability to weave in a sense of believability, eroticism, sensual distress, neurotic behaviour, and breath-taking beauty ties the movie together like no other actress could have done.

February 11, 2006

Sex, but Weird!

My readers should know that I do not read the reviews in Netflix or Amazon before I write my reviews. Be assured that I am giving you my opinion. This often puts me at odds with film critics around the world.

Female Perversions can't have it two ways. If Freud didn't understand women, then don't use his interpretations of how women are women. I'm a Freudian and appreciate smart insight, which Susan Streitfeld provides in analytical dream sequences. I found the dreams uninspired however as cinema. I found both straight sex and lesbian action in this film weirdly unsexy. I'm sure an audience of Lesbians or Feminists or both were wowed by near-pornographic sequences - my heart's all-aflutter.

The scene with the three women and the 13 year old was the most interesting for me probably for all the wrong reasons. The stripper is showing career woman, future judge, Tilda Swinton how to shake booty to lure and dominate men. The stripper's sister has no luck with men. She's kind of a Betty Crocker wanna be with nesting desperations. Betty Crocker's daughter is thirteen and hates being a woman. She mutilates herself for thrills. But so does affirmative action lawyer woman. This part reminded me of the film, Blue Velvet. The smart women mingle with the trailer park trash to share tips on menstruation.

Amy Madigan is Tilda's kleptomaniac sister. She's an egg head that steals panties, so she can have an orgasm. Then there's the scene where naked little sisters cause a stir with daddy because Tilda defecates in the tub. Ouch! This one is personal for the director. Sometimes you have to step back a little. The audience has to have a drink.
September 6, 2004

Pretty Lame

Every once in awhile I like a little dose of film noir. Throw in a dark setting with some creepy characters and I'm good to go. But FEMALE PERVERSIONS fell short of the genre: it was just plain weird. Let's face it, if I wish to be confronted by surreal, one-dimensional people with absolutely no clue I can go to a professional wrestling match. Or go visit my attorney, take your pick. Yet this flick is even more meaningless than Dewey, Cheatum & Howe (my lawyer's firm), and its subsequent perversions are more demeaning than they are perverted.

What's with the lead character in this movie? Tilda Swinton, a most fragile-looking beauty, is miscast in the lead role as a successful, aggressive attorney up for a judgeship by the Governor. She looks like a porcelain doll, and as we get to know her we find she's as unstable as the book shelf I put up the other day in my living room. She's plagued by some demented fantasies. . .or illusions. . .that supposedly have been repressed since her childhood, and for whatever reason she's into razor blades. Her boyfriend gets miffed so she has an affair with a woman. Why? She likes M&M candy. Why? Her fantasies include an overweight woman covered in mud. Why? She sleeps in a hammock. Why? She takes a bath with her sister. Why? She drives a really ugly Turbo converter. Why, oh why?

Don't ask me. I don't know. Or care. Incidentally, Amy Madigan and Frances Fisher head a supporting cast of equally troubled souls. If there is some feminist symbolism to be culled from FEMALE PERVERSIONS it's lost on me; all I saw was a montage of mumbo jumbo. So what to do about my appetite for film noir? Ah, yes: a Three Stooges movie. That should do it.
--D. Mikels February 17, 2004

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