57/100
Apparently a slightly different cut than the one that received mixed reviews back in '97 (I opted to see Romy and Michele's High School Reunion that week instead), though I doubt it makes a huge difference. Both versions fashion a character study from Louise Kaplan's non-narrative work of psychoanalytic theory, which reaps rewards but also has obvious downsides, like every single woman onscreen functioning as a broad case study, pun unintended but now doubled down upon. To her credit, Streitfeld makes little effort to disguise the film's polemical nature, though I prefer some of her pedagogic ideas (quotes about perversion, presumably taken from Kaplan, plastered on a bus-stop bench and taped to the side of a pay phone) much more than others (Eve's blatantly symbolic anxiety dreams featuring theatrical masks and caryatids and a mud creature that anticipates Kulumbegashvili's April). Also nothing involving the androgynous (today it'd be non-binary) teenager Ed (which is genuinely short for Edwina TURN TO THE RIGHT!) remotely works, least of all the (again) bluntly symbolic ending. What does work tends to be dramatically conventional, with Tilda Swinton as a driven attorney, on the verge of receiving a judgeship, whose personal relationships are all foundering due to impostor syndrome and fear of intimacy and a turbo sex drive that nobody else—not even Mr. Krabs at this hunkiest—can handle. That all of this, along with Eve's sister's kleptomania, ultimately gets revealed via home-movie flashbacks as being rooted in good ol' childhood trauma is disappointing, but Swinton somehow manages to make Eve seem like a credible, complex human being even while looking like a sex-shop mannequin carved out of alabaster, and excels opposite Amy Madigan even though the idea that those women share two parents' genetic code is absurd on its face, i.e. their faces. Also the sex scenes, both hetero and lesbian, are genuinely hot, though I knew that already because I've been on the internet for three decades. Kind of a shame that Streitfeld's only other feature as writer-director to date was, per its poster, "Based on the best-selling golf novel of all time."