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Bound, 1996
Corky (Gina Gershon) has just gotten out of prison and is hired as a painter and all-around handyman at an apartment building. Her next door neighbors are Violet (Jennifer Tilly) and her mobster boyfriend Caesar (Joe Pantoliano). In short order, Violet sets out to seduce Corky and involve her in a plan to make a new life for herself and take the opportunity to make off with $2 million that will be in Caesar’s possession for the weekend. But can Corky trust Violent not to set her up as the fall guy for the heist?
Putting a fresh twist on some classic noir tropes, this twisty-turny crime thriller really picks up momentum as it goes.
I think that it’s really easy to be cynical about films that take familiar plot and character structures and change a demographic element---race, gender, sexuality, etc---and see it as a cheap way to look progressive. And are there films that do this in a way that is probably just an attempt to cash in? Yeah. But I think that this film shows that changing the demographics of people in a familiar plot structure can fundamentally alter the dynamics of the story and contort the tropes in interesting ways.
In a typical crime thriller, the character of Corky would be a man. A brooding, maybe not so bright, hunk who gets drawn in by the sexy gangster’s moll very much to his detriment. But making Corky a woman, and by extension making Violet queer, does really interesting things to the character dynamics and what we’d normally expect from the direction of the story.
Just from the jump, Corky being a woman means that she is granted a certain kind of invisibility to the mobsters and specifically to Caesar. Despite her criminal past, Caesar doesn’t register Corky as a threat. He does offer her a bribe at one point--which she takes--to make sure they’re on the same page. But at one point he comes home to find Corky and Violet in the throes of passion on the couch and despite their clearly, um, perturbed state, when he sees that Corky is a woman his suspicions disappear. Likewise, with her wide eyes and “Gee golly!” compliant routine, Violet manages to keep the mobsters thinking of her as a helpless damsel.
Violet being queer---probably gay, possibly bisexual---also makes the nature of her relationship with Caesar more explicitly transactional. At one point, Corky hears Violet and Caesar having sex through the thin apartment walls. Violet tells Corky that what she heard wasn’t sex, it was work. There’s an interesting detail in the film in that the man who embezzled the $2 million from the mob--a man whose torture and murder Violet is forced to witness---according to Violet knew she was queer. If true, it adds another personal element to Violet’s desire to take the money and run: revenge. Violet is trapped in her relationship with Caesar, essentially forced into the role of loving hostess and sex bomb. We see at one point the violent response that would await Violet if she tried to leave Caesar. It adds an extra layer to the trope of the woman who gets herself stuck in a relationship with a crook.
Then there’s the erotic component of the film, and it works really well. I was neither here nor there on Corky’s character, but Tilly is walking sex with her gravely babydoll voice and overt seduction that begins with an unflinching, raw stare behind Caesar’s back during an elevator ride. The sex scene between them is incredibly fiery, but also portrayed in a fantastic panning long shot that captures details like Corky’s foot pulling the corner of a fitted sheet off of the mattress. The detail that Violet is on top during their encounter and it’s Corky we see experiencing orgasm reinforces Violet’s role as femme fatale. Corky several times articulates that Violet could just be setting her up, but what we see helps us understand why she might not entirely care. Explicit-but-not-exploitative is a tricky tightrope to walk and the film really nails it. Reading trivia afterward---that it was a very closed set and done with the input of, imagine!, actual lesbians---makes a lot of sense of what’s on screen. There’s no doubt about the sexual chemistry between the characters, but we have to wait and see if they’ll actually end up together.
I also enjoyed the style of the film, in which you can see glimpses of the techniques and camera moves that would later pop up in grand effect in The Matrix. There are 360 pans around the action, and use of slow-motion. Suddenly an argument taking place in a living room feels like a wild west showdown. There are also some great visual touches, like zooms to ringing phones, close ups on walls through which we can hear sounds of violence, and the iconic shot of hundreds of bills drying on thin lines strung through Caesar and Violet’s apartment.
My only real complaint is that I found some of the violence to be a little too much. I definitely muted and looked away for a chunk of a torture/murder sequence. I understand that the violence in that scene sets the table for the threat against Corky and Violet later in the film as their carefully laid plan begins to unravel. We see in graphic detail what Caesar and his compatriots are capable of, and it’s terrifying. Still, it was a bit much for me, despite understanding its function.
A really solid thriller that delivers and subverts noir crime tropes all in one go.
Bound, 1996
Corky (Gina Gershon) has just gotten out of prison and is hired as a painter and all-around handyman at an apartment building. Her next door neighbors are Violet (Jennifer Tilly) and her mobster boyfriend Caesar (Joe Pantoliano). In short order, Violet sets out to seduce Corky and involve her in a plan to make a new life for herself and take the opportunity to make off with $2 million that will be in Caesar’s possession for the weekend. But can Corky trust Violent not to set her up as the fall guy for the heist?
Putting a fresh twist on some classic noir tropes, this twisty-turny crime thriller really picks up momentum as it goes.
I think that it’s really easy to be cynical about films that take familiar plot and character structures and change a demographic element---race, gender, sexuality, etc---and see it as a cheap way to look progressive. And are there films that do this in a way that is probably just an attempt to cash in? Yeah. But I think that this film shows that changing the demographics of people in a familiar plot structure can fundamentally alter the dynamics of the story and contort the tropes in interesting ways.
In a typical crime thriller, the character of Corky would be a man. A brooding, maybe not so bright, hunk who gets drawn in by the sexy gangster’s moll very much to his detriment. But making Corky a woman, and by extension making Violet queer, does really interesting things to the character dynamics and what we’d normally expect from the direction of the story.
Just from the jump, Corky being a woman means that she is granted a certain kind of invisibility to the mobsters and specifically to Caesar. Despite her criminal past, Caesar doesn’t register Corky as a threat. He does offer her a bribe at one point--which she takes--to make sure they’re on the same page. But at one point he comes home to find Corky and Violet in the throes of passion on the couch and despite their clearly, um, perturbed state, when he sees that Corky is a woman his suspicions disappear. Likewise, with her wide eyes and “Gee golly!” compliant routine, Violet manages to keep the mobsters thinking of her as a helpless damsel.
Violet being queer---probably gay, possibly bisexual---also makes the nature of her relationship with Caesar more explicitly transactional. At one point, Corky hears Violet and Caesar having sex through the thin apartment walls. Violet tells Corky that what she heard wasn’t sex, it was work. There’s an interesting detail in the film in that the man who embezzled the $2 million from the mob--a man whose torture and murder Violet is forced to witness---according to Violet knew she was queer. If true, it adds another personal element to Violet’s desire to take the money and run: revenge. Violet is trapped in her relationship with Caesar, essentially forced into the role of loving hostess and sex bomb. We see at one point the violent response that would await Violet if she tried to leave Caesar. It adds an extra layer to the trope of the woman who gets herself stuck in a relationship with a crook.
Then there’s the erotic component of the film, and it works really well. I was neither here nor there on Corky’s character, but Tilly is walking sex with her gravely babydoll voice and overt seduction that begins with an unflinching, raw stare behind Caesar’s back during an elevator ride. The sex scene between them is incredibly fiery, but also portrayed in a fantastic panning long shot that captures details like Corky’s foot pulling the corner of a fitted sheet off of the mattress. The detail that Violet is on top during their encounter and it’s Corky we see experiencing orgasm reinforces Violet’s role as femme fatale. Corky several times articulates that Violet could just be setting her up, but what we see helps us understand why she might not entirely care. Explicit-but-not-exploitative is a tricky tightrope to walk and the film really nails it. Reading trivia afterward---that it was a very closed set and done with the input of, imagine!, actual lesbians---makes a lot of sense of what’s on screen. There’s no doubt about the sexual chemistry between the characters, but we have to wait and see if they’ll actually end up together.
I also enjoyed the style of the film, in which you can see glimpses of the techniques and camera moves that would later pop up in grand effect in The Matrix. There are 360 pans around the action, and use of slow-motion. Suddenly an argument taking place in a living room feels like a wild west showdown. There are also some great visual touches, like zooms to ringing phones, close ups on walls through which we can hear sounds of violence, and the iconic shot of hundreds of bills drying on thin lines strung through Caesar and Violet’s apartment.
My only real complaint is that I found some of the violence to be a little too much. I definitely muted and looked away for a chunk of a torture/murder sequence. I understand that the violence in that scene sets the table for the threat against Corky and Violet later in the film as their carefully laid plan begins to unravel. We see in graphic detail what Caesar and his compatriots are capable of, and it’s terrifying. Still, it was a bit much for me, despite understanding its function.
A really solid thriller that delivers and subverts noir crime tropes all in one go.