Single White Female

National Review, Oct 5, 1992 by John Simon

* From Schrader to Schroeder: Single White Female, directed by Barbet Schroeder, lost its most provocative touch when, for the sake of political correctness, it changed its title from that of John Lutz's potboiler, on which it is based---SWF Seeks Same. The reference is to the ad that the heroine, Allison, inserts in the New York Times after Sam, her fiance, who shared her elegant apartment in the Ansonia, is caught cheating on her with his ex-wife. So out of the Ansonia and her life he must go. But because such an ad is considered racist today, the title had to be amended, thus forfeiting the play on words and the moral of the story: too much sameness is a dangerous thing.

Allison sedulously screens all applicants, but in a moment of dejection succumbs to the soothing ways of a particularly congenial-seeming young woman, Hedra, whose credentials she fatally fails to examine. Hedra, whose real name is not Hedra (which may be the only good thing about her), is an unhinged twin, whose sister died in a childhood accident, and who has been desperately seeking a surrogate ever since. In the stylish Allison, who runs her own computer business, the frumpy Hedra finds not only (as she believes) the lost sister soul, but also a role model to save her from mediocrity.

With tenacity, cunning, and carefully disguised pathological monomania, Hedy sets 'about alienating Allie from the now repentant Sam, as well as from anyone and anything else that might lessen her prey's dependence on her. When she forces upon Allie a too-too adorable puppy as a Sam-substitute, we know that neither Allie nor Hedy--and least of all the puppy--will safely survive such tyrannical solicitude. Still, despite a paradoxical combination of improbability and predictability, the first half of the film is, as they say, eminently watchable, largely because of the great good looks of Bridget Fonda (Allie) and the impressive talent of Jennifer Jason Leigh (Hedy) who, in film after questionable film, proves herself an inexhaustibly various and persuasive actress.

But if Single White Female were anything but boilerplate, it. would concentrate on developing the psychological drama: Hedy's parasitic taking over of another person's life to the extent of changing herself and the other into mirror images, and the damage this does to all and sundry, emotionally and morally. Instead, the movie turns into something much more commercial and superficial, a cat-and-mouse or perhaps cat-and-cat--thriller, where nothing is shied back from, not even the bringing back to life of a manifestly dead man for the sake of dishonest chills, followed by the unceremonious dumping of that Lazarus merely because the plot no longer requires him.

Starting with an initially interesting proposition--that the Ansonia being rent-controlled, only one name can appear on the lease, which makes Hedy an invisible person with all the disadvantages and sinister advantages of that status--the film rapidly propels itself into improbabilities and impossibilities that queer its standing even within its second-rate genre. There are goings-on such as would be unheard of in a respectable apartment house like the Ansonia, once the home of Schoenberg and still the place of which many distinguished musicians proudly say, "Et in Ansonia ego."

Barbet Schroeder, however, is a director neither unwitty nor unskilled, and the film has its clever and erotically compelling touches. One sequence, in fact, goes from the mildly pornographic to the stunningly fantastic, and once again establishes him as the connoisseur of the bizarre and perverse we remember from such films as Maitresse and Idi Amin Baba. But to revert to his best, Schroeder should return to France, assuming that its cinema has not yet become wholly Americanized.

Mr. Simon, NR's film critic, is also theater critic for New York magazine.