Basic Instinct

Saw Basic Instinct, knotty little mystery film about a cop with a troubled past investigating a cool, bisexual, maneater of a novelist.  The film is clearly evoking Hitchcock throughout, particularly vertigo.  The novelist is a typical Hitchcock blonde and doubles, mind-games, and hair dye feature heavily as plot devices.  There's a hit-tip to Double Indemnity's famous staircase scene early on, and some inspiration from the noirs in the form of the central cop's semi-crooked-ness, but this is a Hitchcock film all the way.

The central engine of the film is the cat-and-mouse, is-it-or-isn't-it game that the cop and writer play with each other.  She's always one step ahead of him, manipulating him and others perfectly, making them dance her tune - or is she?  Maybe she really is just at the unfortunate nexus of stalkers, obsessions, and unfortunate accidents.  This ambiguity is teased until the very last shot of the film.

I found myself getting wrapped up in her mind games myself.  I was so put off by her messing about with the cops (uncrosses legs, re-crosses them) that I didn't trust her at all, but by the last scenes I wasn't so sure.  I wondered how she would have handled a gay detective.  On that note...

This is a very sexy film.  There's many sex scenes of various intensities, there's that infamous leg-crossing scene, and many pretty ladies smooching each other.  There is, alas, one of those basically-rape sex scenes where the girl shouts "no no" but I guess men were expected to be men back in those days, god help us.  That aside: apparently, the central cop was originally supposed to be a lesbian.  That would have been very interesting and might have side-stepped all of this.  This was filmed during the AIDS epidemic when homosexuality and sex in general was becoming much more serious again.  It's nice sometimes to see a film which clearly wants to titillate you and which is so interesting to boot.

This is a good movie.  The sex got a little tedious for me, but it's not intended for me of course.  I enjoyed the mental jousting the main characters do and the subtle interplay of who's acting, who's lying and about what now?  There's a lot of double-negative joking about serious matters and talk of "well if I were a murderer …" which is just delicious.  A nice knotty mystery in the spirit of Hitchcock.  Go see it!