Female Perversions review – Tilda Swinton searches for erotic adventures in rework of Madame Bovary
The actor’s 1996 first US film, as a lawyer trying to manage her complicated love life and traumatic fantasies, marked her out as a screen presence like no other Tilda Swinton made her US debut 30 years ago with this insouciant, startling, experimental adventure in eroticism and neuroticism.
Key points
- She is also deeply attractive and attracted to women, yet also assailed by traumatised fantasies or flashbacks of something in her past; there are terrible lurches of guilt or fear, abuse, loss, self-harm or impostor syndrome.
- Eve is having a passionate affair with a hunky seismologist called John (Clancy Brown), an amusing metaphor for the quake-level sex they’re having.
- Streitfeld’s fictional reworking does not focus on Emma Bovary.
Instead Swinton plays a character called Eve, a brilliant, beautiful – and single – lawyer with an elegant, angular style; she is as graceful and sometimes comically clumsy as a baby giraffe.
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