Single White Female (1992)

his horror thriller directed by Barbet Schroeder is fairly tightly wound with some interesting psychology around an apartment and a ménage à trois. Jennifer Jason Leigh is the mousy, and somewhat dykish, new roommate (and such a beauty she used to be! almost a clone of Elisabeth Shue) interested in Bridget Fonda and Steven Weber (Fonda's semi-cheating fiancé). What we have is women's sex/fear fantasy and titillation with the obligatory "all men are dogs" theme thoroughly worked in. Leigh actually says "men are pigs," which amounts to the same thing, although I guess we could say women are pigs and men are dogs and call it even.

There's some male titillation as well, of course, but Schroeder is primarily interested in spilling blood and out-dyking the dykes. Fonda is kind of cute and sexy, which is why I was able to watch the whole thing. She is, by the way, another one of those children of a star, like Liza Minelli, who would never but never have made it except for the family's stardom, yet achieved a certain appeal through hard work, minimal talent, and a certain audaciousness. She can be striking in a stark, animalistic sort of way. In some sense, her performance here anticipates her role as an America la femme Nikita in Point of No Return (1993) which came out the following year.

Single White Female was considered a controversial sensation when it was released in the early nineties because of the gross sex and violence displayed, but I suspect future generations will see it as high camp and laugh out loud at how it panders to some of our baser instincts. The knock-down, drag-out, blood-flying fight between Leigh and Fonda near the end can be seen as hilarious in its absurdity, and kind of campish as a burlesque of Hollywood's increasingly desperate appeal to blood lust in order to sell tickets. The crude violence and sex was moronically combined with a politically correct portrayal of Fonda as an unsympathetic career girl, fighting the good fight in a world filled with sexist men and sexual harassment. She was in effect the woman as male Hollywood hero. The only thing about her that was all wrong was the hideous, short red hair.