Movie Recs: Female Perversions (1996)
& Abuse of Weakness (2013)
Two films about perverse women I watched this week,
both meditations on codependency:
Female Perversions (1996)
Tilda Swinton plays a neurotic bisexual lawyer who’s pissed about having to drive her shiny convertible out to the desert because her kleptomaniac sister has gotten arrested (the sister blames her shoplifting on penis envy). “Acted with trapped-animal immediacy and intimidating remove,” according to Nick Taylor, the film, based on a book of psychoanalytical theory by Louise J. Kaplan, is full of Classical with a capital C dream sequences and dissociative sex fantasies: robes, pools, rope, and masks. These surreal scenes plus the office interiors’ chiaroscuro lighting and the figure-hugging skirt suits, together feel potentially influential to the Dr. Melfi parts of Sopranos — which came along a few years later in 1999. (Neither the director Susan Streitfeld nor the cinematographer Teresa Medina went on to do much else of note.)
Abuse of Weakness (2013)
A Catherine Breillat film starring Isabelle Huppert. Huppert plays a character who’s based on Breillat, a writer and film director who’s recovering from a stroke and becomes tangled up with a glacial hangdog con man whom she wants to star in her next movie. An erotic game of power, infatuation, exploitation, and surrender ensues. The plot is based on Breillat’s experiences with the scammer Christophe Rocancourt (not to be confused with François-Marie Banier who arguably preyed on Liliane Bettencourt, the subject of a three-part doc on Netflix right now). But as Huppert tells Colleen Kelsey in this interview for Interview, the experience becomes fiction in how Huppert embodies the story: “I think the most fictionalized element might be me, because, obviously, I’m not Catherine. So, there comes fiction from my presence on screen.” More than once, Huppert falls hard. Parts of her body are paralyzed. She portrays weakness forcefully with her signature icy resolve.
