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Female Perversions attempts to translate a psychoanalytic study into a film narrative. Based on Louise J. Kaplan's (1997) Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary, the film is perhaps the first adaptation of a psychoanalytic text to the big screen. The result is a most original creation, which aims at instructing the audience while entertaining, enticing the intellect while titillating and arousing the senses. Directed by Susan Streitfeld, who cowrote the screenplay with Julie Hebert, the film manages to explore the interrelationships between femininity, power, and sexuality through beautiful and evocative images and compositions.
The women in the film portray aspects of Kaplan's formulation of perversions. They are not fully developed characters like those of conventional film narratives but rather ideas incarnated in a group of female archetypes who enact the unique features of their respective perverse strategies. The result is a fascinating and original interplay between the theoretical and the dramatic, the conceptual domain and the clinical reference.
The alluring presence of women's bodies at different stages of undressing or dressing up, with close up of lips or hips, buttocks or breast, arms or legs, shoes or lingerie, are juxtaposed with slogans or brief quotations from Kaplan's original work. The spectator is being guided through the maze of female perversions with the assistance of mini-texts, printed words that divert the gaze from the body to the written word, from flesh to symbols. One is reminded of early cubism or collages where a piece of newspaper was added to the canvas, provoking the viewer, leading to reflection while imposing distance from colors, lines, or forms.
Is the film pornographic or erotic? How is one to differentiate them at a time when boundaries between the private and the public seem to be blurring in all forms of artistic expressions. Female Perversions is explicit without being pornographic, erotic without becoming conven