Mortal Thoughts
                Reviewed by Linda Lopez McAlister
            For The Women's Show, WMNF-FM, Tampa, FL

    The little blurb in the newspaper calls "Mortal Thoughts" a
feminist thriller.  Well, they're right.  But not, I suspect, for
the reasons they think.  They would probably say it's a feminist
film because the husbands die off instead of the wives or merely
because the two central characters are women.  That's not enough to
make a film a feminist one in my book. Nor is it about feminism;
the characters in the film have no feminist consciousness and there
is no overt feminist political discourse here.  No, the sense in
which this is a feminist film is much more subtle, and much more
interesting, in my view.

    I would label "Mortal Thoughts" a feminist film noir.  Now let
me explain my label.  The French phrase "films noir" refers to a
certain kind of gangster movie that came out of Hollywood in the
1940s and '50s, a kind of dark, brooding, underworld film
characterized by stark contrasts of darkness and light, films like
"Lady from Shanghai" "The Big Sleep" "Double Indemnity," "Sunset
Boulevard," and "Mildred Pierce" to name a few.  These films have
several typical features in common.  They are about solving a
crime, usually a murder; but they are also usually focused on
unravelling the truth about a mysterious woman; they are usually
narrated in the first person by a male protagonist and the story 
told in a series of flashbacks; there is usually a strong female 
central character who is or appears to be evil and
homelife/marriage/domesticity is notable by its absence.  By the
end of a film noir, the crime is solved and the truth about the
mysterious woman is revealed.  Remember all that for a minute while
I say something about feminist films.

    One of the main preoccupations of feminist filmmakers over the
last 20 years has been to make films that depict real women's real
lives, eschewing Hollywood glamour for a more realistic portrait
of, frequently, working class women with homes, children, husbands,
jobs, etc. Sometimes they intersperse newsreels, archival footage,
or even home movies to create a sense of reality.  Another feminist
preoccupation has been to make films that insist that the audience
think about what they're seeing instead of films which give us a
pat story told from a God's-eye perspective with all the loose ends
neatly tied up at the end as most Hollywood films do.

   If someone set out consciously to combine these features of
feminist film with film noir "Mortal Thoughts" might be the result.
It keeps most of the conventions of film noir but turns them on
their heads.  In "Mortal Thoughts" we have a crime to be solved and
the mysterious actions of a women to be deciphered.  It is
narrated, by a woman not a man, and told in flashbacks.
Instead of there being no reference to domestic life, this film is
totally immersed in the reality of the leading characters' lives as
young wives and mothers who work together as hairdressers in ethnic
working class Bayonne, New Jersey. (By the way, Demi Moore and
Glen Hedley are very good in these roles with their New Jersey
accents and convincing working class way of moving and being).  The
film starts and ends with home movie footage of what we presume to
be these women as children, to emphasize that they've been lifelong
friends.

      Most importantly, this film generates enormous suspense and
tension as we, along with the detectives, try to figure out what
really happened. Up until the last reel, having been reared on the
Hollywood convention that all will be revealed in the end, we sit
back and let the pieces fall into place.  But the ultimate reason
this is a feminist film, in my view, is that at the last minute
something happens that undercuts the entire interpretation we've
been manipulated into giving to the events and characters in the
film, and then it ends.  Leaving you, the audience, on your own to
rethink the entire film and figure out who you think did what to
whom and why. It admits of all sorts of alternative interpretations, 
take your pick.  It's a stunning conclusion and never has a Hollywood 
film left you thinking so hard as you walk out the door and drive home.  
Three cheers for Alan Rudolph the director, and for Demi Moore who coproduced 
and who made a very good choice of material with this feminist thriller.

   For the WMNF Women's Show this is Linda Lopez McAlister on women
and film.