Freud calling

Tilda Swinton gets a little perverse

by Peter Keough

Directed by Susan Streitfeld. Written by Susan Streitfeld and Julie Hebert based on the book by Dr. Louise J. Kaplan. With Tilda Swinton, Amy Madigan, Karen Sillas, Frances Fisher, LailaRobins, Paulina Porizkova, Clancy Brown, and Dale Shuger. An October Films release. Opens Friday at the Avon Repertory Cinema and Jane Pickens Theatre.

If Hollywood can adapt movies from computer games and comic books, then why shouldn't an enterprising independent filmmaker make one from a book on Freudian psychology? At any rate, first-time director Susan Streitfeld probably didn't have much competition from studio moguls when she optioned Dr. Louise J. Kaplan's Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary. The real challenge was transforming analytical nonfiction into drama and images. With its first moments -- a luminous lovemaking scene intercut with a baroque, portentous fantasy sequence -- Perversions seizes the screen with utter confidence, brimming imagination, and volatile emotion.

Much of the success of that transformation owes to the astonishing Tilda Swinton, one of the sexiest (in every sense of the word) actors in movies today. She's Eve Stephens, whose athletic screwing and dour daydreaming begin the film. A sharklike district attorney who flaunts her assets in court and sports fetishistic power suits and the chicest shade of lipstick, she has ruthlessly maneuvered her career toward a pending appointment as a judge. But a recurrent, unresolved dread of her fantasy life and snippets of childhood trauma intrude into her glitzy routine of crackling court appearances, cellular phone calls in her Saab Turbo, and shopping. Her façade of accomplishment, it's clear, is doomed to crumble.

For Kaplan, what is truly perverse is stereotype, the false identities and desires defined by social convention. Which makes Eve the most perverse character in the film, since she's bought into the oppressor's system with more than the usual enthusiasm. Yet this Eve has more than one face. Although she's ostensibly attached to John (Clancy Brown), a pony-tailed sophisticate employed as an earthquake engineer, Eve's life is dominated by the women in her life whose conflicts and self-images mirror those faces she tries to ignore.

Her sister Madelyn (Amy Madigan) is a mousy graduate student who rebels against the patriarchy through kleptomania (lingerie, cosmetics, and overpriced designer accessories are favorites) and by writing her doctoral dissertation about a primitive Mexican community where a woman's profusion of pubic hair is indicative of power. Renee (Karen Sillas) is a beautiful young psychiatrist whom Eve meets in an elevator and falls in lust with. Shadowing these relationships is a Freudian dream of a kabuki-like king and queen, a tightrope, and a cruciform swimming pool, and also a fragmented memory of Eve's father, a pen, and her late mother being knocked to the floor.

It sounds a bit schematic -- a collection of case histories, which is what the original book was. At times Female Perversions succumbs to this limitation with scenes that are strained and polemical. In one painful, sisterhood-is-powerful moment, Madelyn, her pubescent and gender-confused daughter Edwina (Dale Shuger), man-hungry and low self-esteemed neighbor Emma (Laila Robins), and Eve all attend a striptease performance by Annunciata (Frances Fisher), who's instructing them in the shallow and cynical ways of winning men. It's bad performance art -- even Swinton seems bored with it.

Fortunately, Swinton brings a bold intelligence and sweeping energy to the rest of the movie, uplifting the already excellent cast and giving dramatic life to the canny abstractions of Kaplan's text and the compelling script. For her part Streitfeld creates a vivid and inventive imagery, combining Antonioni-like alienating composition and expressionistic color with a Buñuel-esque sense of wryly surreal detail.

Eve's confrontations with her sister intensify, as Madelyn's incarceration and pending PhD orals distract Eve from focusing on her appointment, and Madelyn's motives prove to stem from malignant sibling rivalry. Add to that Eve's troubles with her lovers, her suppressed past, and most mysteriously with the future in the form of the troubling, hoydenish Edwina -- it all transcends this film's conceptual roots and curdles into visceral passion. The journey ends with a resolution that makes clinical sense, perhaps; more important, it's ineffably moving, passing beyond the narrow urgency of sexual politics and into the realm of myth.