Tilda Swinton made her US debut 30 years ago with this insouciant, startling, experimental adventure in eroticism and neuroticism. It’s an amazingly unselfconscious performance which marked her out as quite unlike any other female lead, all but impossible to cast in boilerplate Hollywood cinema. First-time indie film-maker Susan Streitfeld was director and co-writer on this adaptation of psychoanalyst Louise J Kaplan’s nonfiction study Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary, which suggested that what we think of perversions are not clinical pathologies, but creative and liberating strategies, nonconformist choreographies, modes of escaping oppressive gender roles, and a rational search for pleasure.
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. 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. 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.
Just as she is on the verge of being appointed as a judge, Eve has to drive out to a remote town in the desert to get her sister Maddie (Amy Madigan) out of jail for shoplifting. (That, too, turns out to be a compulsive and sensual perversion.) And in doing so she gets acquainted with Maddie’s melancholy home life; she meets her friend Annunciata (Frances Fisher) who declaims the secret of sexiness and learned femininity: “You gotta erase yourself; you gotta be generic.” And then there is the love life of Maddie’s roommate Emma (Laila Robins), who has a young daughter. It is here that Eve has to confront her own past.
Streitfeld creates theatrical tableaux of sexual yearning, laced with black comedy, an exceptionally difficult combination to bring off. In some ways it’s a kind of lo-fi LA Law, riffing on the sexiness of business suits – though Swinton at one stage has a wonderful short-sleeved pink sweater. It also has something of David Lynch’s Lost Highway, and even John Huston’s The Misfits; Swinton hovers through it with preternatural composure, even in the extremities of sensual abandon.
• Female Perversions is on Mubi from 13 November
