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By Root 5463 0

alcoholic and cocaine-user, that his wife committed suicide and that he had been in trouble for accidentally killing some tourists. This is because she has lured one of Nick's fellow policemen into giving her his confidental police file, and when he discovers this, the culprit is soon found shot, leading to Nick's suspension from duty as a suspect. He besottedly tracks Catherine down in a nightclub in a converted church, where he finds her taking cocaine in a lavatory cubicle with a black man, with her lesbian partner standing by. But Catherine takes him home to bed, to engage in frenzied sex, and when she insists on tying him down with a white silk scarf he is so carried away by the excitement he no longer cares whether she is about to murder him or not.

In archetypal terms, Catherine is thus a classic Temptress, beautiful and deadly. Yet, in the spirit of late-twentieth-century `feminism, she is very much presented as the story's heroine, precisely because she is a strong, clever woman making a fool of all the men around her, above all the weak, bemused hero. And just to neutralise any concerns the audience might have at admiring such a ruthlessly dark figure, the script is then given a cunning twist.

By hints and innuendos, a second woman is built up as Catherine's doppelganger. Nick learns that Beth, his police colleague and former girl friend, had been at college with Catherine, where they read psychology together.They had enjoyed a lesbian affair. They had both dyed their hair blonde, dressed alike and tried to look alike. Had Beth, Nick wonders, killed her husband, just as Catherine killed her parents? When Nick arrives just too late to save his closest friend from being murdered with an ice-pick by a half-glimpsed blonde woman, he then runs into Beth in the same building, seemingly holding a gun, and shoots her. It turns out she had not been holding a gun at all, and her dying words are `I love you'. So had Beth really committed this latest murder or not? Had she even been responsible, Nick begins to wonder, for all the other murders as well? Or had all the clues pointing to this been planted with devilish cunning by the real murderer, Catherine herself? Deliberately we are denied any of the information which would provide answers to these questions. Then, when Nick finally returns home, he finds Catherine waiting for him. They make passionate love, with her in the `male' position on top. As the film ends, the camera slides down her side of the bed to the floor, where we see an ice-pick. Is Catherine about to murder the detective in an exact repeat of the film's opening scene? We are left suspecting she might, but we are never allowed to know.

Although the story is thus deliberately turned into a nyktomorph, an image which cannot be resolved, to tease its audience into seeing Catherine as an ambivalent figure who just might not be guilty after all, Yet we have already seen quite enough of her to know that she has all the attributes of a heartless monster. As a metaphorical counterpart to Hannibal Lecter, she is a complete `man-eater. She is a supreme example of a woman in the grip of her `negative animus, driven by the masculine component in her personality in the darkest way possible. Using her sexuality as a bait, she is hard, cruel, calculating, predatory, using her power only to destroy. She is egotism incarnate. And in this respect, we have seen the world of fantasy moving from one end of the spectrum to the other. In the beginning was de Sade enjoying the spectacle of Justine, the selfless `light feminine', being made the helpless victim of a succession of devilish men. The pattern eventually comes full circle, showing a devilish woman, possessed by her inner masculinity in its darkest form, making helpless victims of a succession of weak men. Yet, so far had the `dark inversion' taken over the fashionable image of womanhood that, unlike her male counterpart Lecter, this glamorous psychopath could somehow be presented to the audience as a heroine to be admired.

What may be seen as a final forlorn footnote