Do You Like Romantic Comedy? (Butterfly Kiss (DVD))

Member Name: venceremos

Product:	Butterfly Kiss (DVD)
Date:	31/08/09 (35 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Unforgettable

Disadvantages: None of your friends will have heard of it

Well, this has romance and this has comedy. It also has a hell of a lot more.

If David Lynch was a Northerner, this would be the sort of film he'd be making. As it is, it is directed by Michael Winterbottom, and was released in 1995 to very little fanfare, at a few arthouses who'd take the risk with it, and was largely ignored thereafter. Unjustly, I think.

This romance takes place in the M6 corridor of Lancashire, and the hum of motorway traffic is never very far away from it. Eunice (Amanda Plummer) is a traveller along that route, looking for a woman called Judith she can't recognise and a song about love she doesn't remember. Miriam (Saskia Reeves) is a dowdy hearing-impaired shop assistant at a service station, and principal carer for her elderly mother.

When the two meet in that transient world, there's a spark of electricity between them - but not literally, as Eunice, in despair at ever finding Judith, had doused herself in petrol. Miriam takes her home, and after putting her elderly mother to bed, begins what is revealed to be (by the clever device of an after-the-event black-and-white formal interview, snippets of which appear at various stages in the film) her first sexual experience with Eunice, a woman whose body is in a constant state of chafing and bruising as a result of the many chains and piercings she wears about her.

If Miriam is infatuated, Eunice is intially less so, and disappears again in her quest for Judith before Miriam awakes. Such has been her effect on Miriam that the latter immediately abandons her mother in search of her. By the time she catches up, Eunice has hitch-hiked with, seduced and murdered a truck-driver. Miriam, in the first flush of infatuation, simply wants to dispose of the body.

And so the road movie continues, with Miriam becoming increasingly involved in the psychopathic and psychosexual murderous activity of her lesbian lover. Eunice is seemingly in despair that an all-powerful God is not on hand to dole out the punishment she deserves, punishment she inflicts on her own body by the wearing of the aforementioned chains. She is unrepentant, and incapable of change, at one point telling Miriam: "I'll make you evil before you make me good."

It's hard to think of a film to compare this to as a litmus test of whether you will like it. I could suggest "Thelma and Louise" meets "Natural Born Killers", yet the setting and the plot are markedly different from both. While it has been described as a feminist movie, I think that's hard to justify given that there is initially a female murder victim, and I think it has more to do with the traits and power of female sexuality than feminist politics. The couple refer to each other as "Mi" and "Eu" which has evocations of schizophrenia about it. The soundtrack is a strongly female one, predominated by The Cranberries, but also including PJ Harvey, Bjork and Shakespeare's Sister.

I'm not promising you a romantic comedy with a feelgood factor, but I do promise that this movie will stay with you long after you've watched it. It seems Amazon will release another version on DVD on 7th September 2009 (although it's been out there a while) so if you want to see something genre-defying and thought-provoking, now seems the perfect time to check it out.

Summary: It'll haunt you