Feline Fetishes

CAT PEOPLE is a movie one doesn't forget, though it's not an unforgettable movie. It sticks out in the mind rather than impresses itself upon it--sort of like old kitty litter.

An offshoot of Val Newton's 1942 thriller of the same name. Cat People has one concern, the duality of sexuality--love versus last, innocence versus corruption, spiritual versus animal.

A young woman is led by several men out into a sandy orange landscape. With dreamlike acquiescence she walks. They come to a solitary tree. She is bound to the tree and the men leave. Soon a black leopard comes upon her.

Cut to a wide-eyed young woman. Alone, she drifts through the airport. Her name is Irena. She is an orphan, a virgin. She turns her head and surveys her surroundings with intent eyes. Their darkness rivals that of her short black hair. Her mouth is wide and seems to have a perpetual pout. She is pretty.

Irena (Natassia Kinski) is the embodiment of this duality. She is a cat person. Cat people have the peculiar tendency of transforming into black leopards when sexually aroused. They can regain human form only by killing. Only if they mate with their own kind can they avoid this dastardly B-movie fate.

All this is unknown to Irena, when she goes to New Orleans to live with her brother Paul (Malcolm McDowell). Having been raised in orphanages and foster homes, Irena has never met Paul, but she has dreamt about him. Paul has likewise dreamt about Irena--dirty dreams. He too is a cat person.

Paul tell his sister of their affliction: "Each time it happens you tell yourself it's love, but it isn't. It's blood. It's death. And you can't be free from the nightmare, except with me. And I with you. I've waited so long for you."

Irena recoils in horror and disbelief. She has already fallen in love with another man--the curator of the zoo.

Innocent yet animal. Irena embodies the conflict between the two natures of sexuality, and Kinski, emulating her success in Tess, gives an admirable performance. Though the sexual theme holds great potential for creating vivid, powerful characters, Irena could be played by a stuffed animal. The audience, primed with Cinderella fairytales and pubescent fantasies, already knows Irena's conflict. And so director Paul Schrader (American Gigolo, Hardcore. Blue Collar) uses his characters as no more than props.

McDowell's performance as the brother comes closest to avoiding sterile characterization. A minister of a Pentecostal sect. Paul has struggled desperately to overcome his affliction through religious faith. But Schrader gives only a taste of Paul's struggle and abruptly throws the focus back to Irena.

While the characters are shallow, everything else reeks of over-kill. The sex scenes are unnecessarily explicit, and Schrader revels in giving us the gamut on perversion from bestiality and incest to kink and sado-masochism. Schrader also isn't much interested in generating suspense. When Irena suddenly wanders through a surreal Cajun bayou, the audience is too confused to be worried. Occasionally Schrader resorts to the cheap device of startling the viewer--something appears suddenly or moves when it shouldn't. All in all, Cat People is as imaginative as coitus interruptus--and about as subtle.

Schrader aspires to nothing and succeeds masterfully. From his subconscious has come a movie that reflects the pubescence of a society whose view of sex is about as spiritual as a strawberry-flavored douche. Cat People is a reaction, a burp caused by the sexual junkfood of Hugh Hefner, erotic bakeries, and crotchless underwear. And, like belching, it provides relief though one feels obliged to say, "Excuse me."