The Last Seduction (1994, John Dahl) (Patreon)

79/100

[SPOILERS ahoy, third paragraph only.]

Third viewing, last seen 1995. And nearly 30 years later, there still haven't been many (any?) other female protagonists like Bridget Gregory, aka Wendy Kroy—a figure of pure unrepentant malevolence, whose viciously destructive behavior we're encouraged to admire on the grounds that she's smarter and cooler and hotter than everyone else onscreen. Plenty of badass guys like that in cinema history, precious few gals; with the possible partial exception of Leave Her to Heaven (which I haven't watched in a while), and I guess the second half of Gone Girl, I'm having trouble thinking of a femme fatale who functions as our identification figure, rather than as said (male) figure's downfall. What's more, Linda Fiorentino's frozen-veins performance (which should have won the Oscar that year but wasn't even eligible; really wish I'd started the Skandies in '94 instead of '95) has a throwback feel without ever coming across as imitative or mannered. Indeed, of all the many movies released during my lifetime that have been labeled "neo-noir," The Last Seduction is the one that best suggests what true film noir might have been like had there been not only no Production Code at the time but no lingering trace of quasi-Victorian propriety. I can readily imagine it starring Barbara Stanwyck as Bridget, Dan Duryea as her ineffectually vengeful husband, and maybe someone like Van Johnson as Mike the hapless dupe. Obviously, a film made in (say) 1946 could never have included the exchange "What if I want to be more than your designated fuck?" "I'll designate someone else"...but that flavor of dialogue and attitude feels much more '40s than '90s to me. And so, really, does Last Seduction's heartlessness, even though no Code-era noir could end with evil triumphing (even in so blasé a manner as it does here). 

Again, though, Dahl wisely chose not to fashion a self-conscious homage, transplanting noir's spirit into an unmistakably contemporary vessel. The film's look is mostly undistinguished—you could argue that this stems from Bridget being trapped in bland, boring "cowtown," except that scenes in New York don't exactly pop either—but Joseph Vitarelli's jazzy score (which I immediately bought and have been listening to for closing in on 30 years) beautifully blends menace (from the stand-up bass) and playfulness (from the brass/woodwind melodies) in a way that gives what transpires its own unique mood, and gives us permission to be amused by depravity. The cast responds in kind: Fiorentino lets us see Bridget improvising schemes in real time (some don't proceed as expected and require on-the-fly tweaking); Peter Berg does a credible job of making Mike simultaneously ruled by his dick and way more sensible than your standard patsy (the latter eventually becomes a problem, see below); and Bill Pullman has the time of his fucking life, from bellowing "You better run!" out the window to merrily fake-jogging around his apartment to trick Bridget into thinking that he ran down the street to the pay phone as she instructed. All of these relationships (and I could throw in J.T. Walsh as Bridget's blithely pragmatic lawyer) are wilier than you'd expect, which means that it never entirely feels like the men are just getting steamrolled, even though they all (apart from the lawyer) wind up utterly flat.

Much as I love The Last Seduction, though, its final 10 minutes have always been a disaster. (Here's where you might wanna check out if you've never seen the film.) My fear that it would seem a thousand times worse today was thankfully unrealized—it's just as lame as it always was, no more or less. We only get a glimpse of Trish from a distance, so the transphobia is mostly a matter of (a) Mike's overwhelming shame (so potent that it persuades him to commit murder, after he'd spent the whole movie resisting Bridget's insanity; one of my favorite aspects of Steve Barancik's clever script is the way that Mike repeatedly and stubbornly responds to "Let's kill some dude for money" like a real person rather than like a movie character) and (b) the implication that Trish somehow tricked Mike into marrying her without disclosing that she's trans, which I'm pretty sure is not a thing that actually happens even if the individuals in question are very drunk. And then there's also the whole track four of In Utero business, which pushes Mike too far out of character for that context or nearly any other. I've never been offended by the film's ending, and still wasn't this time. It's just weak. Unworthy of what precedes it. Barancik painted himself into a corner with Mike's fundamental decency, and the way out he found is so contrived, with its twin layers of facile button-pushing, that it comes across as embarrassingly desperate. Bugged me enough at the time that I dropped the film from my top 10 list on second viewing, and it's still consigned to #11. Right up until that stumble off the cliff, though, you couldn't ask for more discomfiting fun with a casual (and female!) sociopath.