ABC
Reviewer Julie Rigg *****

Once Upon a Time, back in the seventies when women began to get their hands on movie cameras again, there was this desire to tell it like it really is. Women were many other things besides glossy and admiring objects of male fantasy; they were ready to break out of the narrow roles to which post-war filmmaking had consigned them. The apron-clad Debbie Reynolds and Ava Gardner vamps were discarded. There was ground to make up, and a world to explore. Cinderella snorted, put on Doc Martens and went out to find a better-paying job. When she could afford them, she acquired a briefcase, a good suit and her own mortgage.

Almost the last world to explore was that of the psyche. Female lust could be admitted, but the dark and dangerous impulses – the attraction to dangerous men, the wish for revenge - never. When women killed it was for self-defence, or to sacrifice themselves for another.
What no one could account for was the surprising persistence of female fantasies of falling in love. The dream of perfect union, perfect fulfilment, and living happily ever after.

There’s a very interesting group of films which I think is beginning to address this puzzle. Let's call them the 'anti-romance' films. In France, filmmakers like Catherine Breillat who made Romance and then A Ma Soeur have turned their attention to the female psyche. In English-speaking cinema, Jane Campion was among the first of the post-seventies feminists to peer into the sometimes perverse female psyche. Sweetie admitted female narcissism, repression and the fiercest of sibling rivalries; The Piano explored such things as woman’s protest directed against her own body; sex as subversion, sex as currency, sex for curiosity. Campion’s heroines were always, in their own ways, lustful.

Some of these anti-romance films use genre to make their points. Virginie Despentes’s Baise-Moi used a splatter version of the road movie to rework the 'rape and revenge' genre which, fashioned by men, has usually combined titillation with high moral ground (see, for example, Shekar Kapur’s Bandit Queen.

Baise-Moi shocked because it exploited the sex and violence conflation most women refuse because it’s usually directed at us. But in this film, pace Godard, the girls had the guns.

In The Cut, releasing here next month, is Jane Campion’s most explicit film, yet about the craving which will lead a woman to seek out sex with a man she distrusts and even fears. She has compromised the ending, and that’s a pity; but the critics who misread it as a suspense-less thriller fail to see that it's about sex first and fear second. Female desire that is. Who was it said 'Perfect love casts out fear'? Maybe it should be female fantasy.

Some anti-romance films employ fantasy in the most matter-of-fact register. Claire Denis’s Vendredi Soir is an encounter between a woman stuck in a monumental Parisian traffic jam, and a male stranger who gets into her car. She spends the night with him, and their courtship dance is delicate and fraught as it always is. In the morning she walks away to her new life without a backward look.

Now there is Gaylene Preston’s Perfect Strangers in some ways the wildest anti-romance of all. Preston is an accomplished New Zealand director whose last three features have played out on a social canvas.

This film is different. The heroine is Melanie, and she’s played by Rachael Blake in a performance which fulfils – exceeds - all the promise she showed in Lantana Melanie is not a good girl. She’s wanton, and she’s bored. She works in a fish and chip shop in a small town on the wild West Coast of New Zealand. And she can have her pick of any of the men at the local pub. One Friday night she meets the perfect stranger there at the pub. He’s tall dark, handsome and unusually well mannered. He's played by Sam Neill.

'Your place or mine?' he asks. 'Yours,' she says, 'I already know mine.'

In the morning she wakes up to find herself at sea. He’s sailed her away to her own little island...and he knows all about her.

This film addresses a situation every women dreads and most at some time have experienced. What do you do when you find yourself in this kind of danger? If you want to live, do you fight, or do you submit? But that’s only the start of the story.

Perfect Strangers is a wild combination of thriller and fable. It plays with our expectations of the handsome prince fairy story, and the stalker story as well. It has a great deal to say about the craving for love, and its wellsprings. 'Falling in love,' says Preston, 'is to fall into a kind of madness.'

I cannot tell you more about the story. But I can guarantee this film will surprise you. It confirms Rachael Blake as a magnificent actor, and Gaylene Preston as a filmmaker at the height of her powers.