Film
The Last Seduction
- Director
- John Dahl
- Certificate
- 18
- Running Time
- 110 mins
It’s hard to imagine anyone with a pulse not being swept up by this 1994 erotic thriller’s skilfully plotted twists, thoroughly engrossed in the lead’s appalling behaviour, and deposited breathless at the outrageous denouement, desperately trying to remember all the quotable lines to recite in the bar afterwards. All the more surprising was the fact that this superior noir was helmed by John Dahl, who previously gave us Kill Me Again and the schlocky-but-fun Red Rock West, ably assisted by the sharpest of scripts by Steve Barancik.
The opening credits sequence cuts tellingly between the lives of Bridget Gregory (Linda Fiorentino) and her hubby Glen (Bill Pullman). In a Manhattan insurance office, Bridget is every inch the hard-nosed power bitch, bullying the male telesales staff with a constant stream of Glengarry Glen Ross-style abuse (“You eunuch!”). Across town, cringing Clay thinks he’s about to be shot by a pair of gun-toting hoods to whom he’s trying to sell a substantial quantity of pharmaceutical cocaine, but they just dump the cash and walk away. Back home after their hard day’s graft, clammy Clay takes a bath to wash off the smell of fear while Bridget flees to the ‘cow town’ of Boston with the ill-gotten gains. In her new persona as Wendy Kroy, she’s approached by swaggering barfly Mike (Peter Berg), with the irresistible chat-up line: “I’m hung like a horse. Think about it.” “Show me,” she demands, without missing a beat, and the hapless hick is soon hopelessly entangled in her web.
As the most fatale of all ’90s movie femmes, who lives by her wits rather than resorting to the tiresome hack’n’slash of the archetypal screen female psycho, Fiorentino is a revelation: she’s not deranged, just untroubled by conscience and in total control of her destiny. Long-suffering female moviegoers will also be delighted to find a film in which men are universally played for suckers and whine about being used as sex objects, while their abuser works up some truly delicious scams and drips bons mots (“A woman loses 50% of her authority when people find out who she’s sleeping with”) as she hits just as far below the belt as is necessary to get her way.
It’s back on screen in the ‘shed’s new Friday Night Thrillers season.
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