Heaven knows I'm no prude. And it was with no small amount of anticipatory glee that I read Movieline Magazine's comments concerning the scope of Female Perversions' sexual content. See, I figured I had a pretty good idea about what I was letting myself in for. Goes to show what I know...
The film was playing at The Music Box -- an absolutely fabulous theater in Chicago, refurbished to look like a Spanish hacienda, complete with twinkling stars and a scrim of clouds moving overhead. The theater alone was worth the price of admission, with its scalloped red velvet curtain and urns of ivy trailing down from the box seats above. There was a lot of gilded plaster work and red Spanish tile all around. Just imagine a production of Zorro, as staged by Liberace, and you'll have it. But it would be safe to say that the ambiance of the place could have never fully prepared us for what we were about to witness onscreen.
Female Perversions has garnered some good reviews, winning a thumbs up from both Siskel and Ebert (Hey, how often does that happen?), and a good amount of attention from the gay press. It's also been called "a gorgeous satire", as well as "psychologically astute and highly erotic" by the more artsy-fartsy film festival reviewers.
But mostly, it just managed to piss me off with its self-indulgence and rather narrow, stereotypical view of women. I guess I should count myself among the lucky, since I couldn't actually identify with any of these ridiculous, hysterical creatures who supposedly represented me and the rest of the female world. Maybe I'm just a country bumpkin who hasn't "evolved" enough to appreciate the satire to be mined from self-mutilation and kleptomania. Either that, or my brain hasn't been clogged by the same amount of theater popcorn cholesterol as the average ten-a-penny movie critic. Whatever the reason, I guess I missed the point. I thought we were going to see Clancy get naked...
And naked he was...In fact, the very first scene involving "our hero" proved to be quite a shocker. Not because he did indeed show up bare ass to the wind and performing a few acts that most of us have only dreamed about in our wildest fantasies. But because he was still sporting the Danziger look from Earth 2, complete with long hair and beard stubble to match! And did I forget to mention his name was John in this movie?
It was not unlike watching a train wreck.
I'm sure I must have looked just like the damned RCA Victor dog, sitting
there with my head sort of cocked to one side, trying to convince my brain
that I was really seeing what I was seeing. My tender psyche was
not in the least prepared to witness John Danziger (and I do mean ALL
of John Danziger), sprawled out on a wrecked bed, working up a sweat
that had nothing to do with him crawling his way out of the desert.
If it had been Clancy -- short-hair, fire in his eye, "Go ahead and do
anything you want with this character, I'm gonna be dead at the end of
the movie, anyway" Clancy -- things might have been different. But
it was an unexpected bonus to see his Danziger cum Nazarene look under
such extreme circumstances.
Oh, to have had a pause button and slo-mo... Let's just say that hair of his took on a life of its own.
Unfortunately, the woman he was paired with was a thoroughly bloodless bundle of neurosis, as played by Tilda Swinton (of Orlando fame. That's a weird one, too, if you're interested.) Swinton -- who somehow manages to stay expressionless, even as she displays more nervous facial tics than the average Hugh Grant extravaganza -- brought about as much spark to the love scene as a frigid firefly. At first, I figured that the director Susan Streitfeld was purposely trying to reduce the heterosexual encounters to nothing more than impersonal ruts to make a political point. But later, when we got to the lesbian love scenes and they were no more erotic than the straight ones, I had to wonder. Streitfeld did put a lot more loving care into how those were filmed. Still, though the character was obviously supposed to appear selfish and emotionally distant in all her relationships, the performance came off as more mechanical than anything else.
Paradoxically, it was Clancy's second scene (in which he appeared fully clothed), that gave us the most heat. He did look positively edible, standing there in a dark blue cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a tight pair of faded jeans that knew every dirty secret he ever tried to hide. This turned out to be the infamous, much anticipated "shaving cream" scene, which was reported a few issues back. Worry not, his chest hair did remain intact. (Destroying that would have been a crime against humanity.) Though I may never look at a can of Barbasol quite the same way again.
After showing up at his office unexpectedly, Swinton's character Eve tries to get her loverboy Johnny off the phone by laying out all the barber shop accoutrement she's bought for an afternoon full of fun. Alas, his phone call seems to be more important. That is, until you realize that he's purposely prolonging it as part of the build-up. When he kneels down in front of her and asks (in skin tingling close-up) whether she's locked the door or not, and her answer is "No", his husky response of "Good girl..." is like a well placed punch in the gut. With those two words, Clancy Brown managed to lay bare every kink in that particular cat's tail. The fact that he then places the safety razor in his teeth and heads south for a very high stakes game of "Trust me?" only confirms that this is a character who is on slightly more intimate terms with danger than most people would like to be.
Clancy only appears three times in this movie, the third being a break-up scene that is only remarkable in that we get to watch him struggle with putting on a necktie.
My biggest regret is that he wasn't acting opposite Amy Madigan, who played Eve's kleptomaniac sister with the same ferocity she brings to everything else. I think she and Clancy could have torn things up a little. Or maybe Paulina Porizkova -- the barracuda lawyer who was ready to take over Eve's office and position at the law firm, even before she'd vacated it. That could have been an interesting match.
I'm not sure what else there is to say about Female Perversions. Perhaps the most overriding question should be "What is it about?" But frankly, I couldn't answer that one if I tried. How does one sum up a movie that features the further neurotic adventures of a pair of sisters who are still trying to overcome the fact that Daddy was a cold, distant, unfeeling S.O.B.? Or how to unravel the thirteen year old girl who's into razor blades and cutting herself even more than the older, wiser Eve? That child's little graveyard in the desert certainly proved to be the height of angst-ridden obsession about the horrors of being a woman. Then there's the little girl's mom, whose sole reason for existence seems to be her hopeless dream of marrying some Bubba with a full set of teeth and a paid off Harley. Not to mention the confused lesbian psychoanalyst, the hotcha-hotcha Hollywood body double doing a striptease as the little girl chops up her mommy's wedding dress, and the back flashes of Eve's own mother, who is cruelly rejected by her husband and crumples to the floor -- all quivery-lipped and teary -- like so much damaged goods.
Oh, yeah! Feels so good to be a woman!
If this was meant to convey all the pain, confusion, and double standards that real-life modern women have to deal with, it failed rather miserably. Since all the sturm und drang was mostly self-inflicted, it only pointed up the opposite opinion that women are their own worst enemies and shouldn't be trusted because of their emotions. Sorry, Susan. The propaganda cuts both ways...
What Clancy was doing in this mess is another question. Perhaps the best way to illustrate the enigma that is Female Perversions is to mention the one image they went back to several times (for no apparent reason). It was a photograph of a Maori chieftain, decked out in a rather sporty headdress made up of five or six live iguanas. Yes, I said iguanas. The symbolism in that is something I don't even want to think about. But you're welcome to, if you think it might help.
A better piece of advice would be this: If you want to see Clancy Brown do a love scene, one that has steam and passion and some good chemistry between the participants, rent Blue Steel. There are a few shots in that one that still make my Lazy Boy rock a little faster. If you're only interested in tender, romantic kissing scenes, then Clancy's role in Bloodlines: Murder in the Family opposite Mimi Rogers, will fill the bill. It's played twice in the last six months or so on Lifetime, so you might want to look for it. But if you're more interested in the sweaty stuff, if there are a few questions about Clancy's anatomy that Blue Steel left unanswered, then I guess the one to see would be Female Perversions. Just don't say I didn't warn you.
My thanks to Char Haguewood for keeping an eye on what was playing in the Chicago art houses, and for picking me up at the train station. It was quite an afternoon, wasn't it? Do let me know if you've figured out that iguana thing yet. Myself? I'm at a total loss. I do know I'd like to sit and watch Clancy play with a rubber band again, though. Stay off those crumbling bridges, lady!