Tilda Swinton’s lawyer confronts desire and trauma in 1996 film

Tilda Swinton’s first US film, Susan Streitfeld’s 1996 *Female Perversions*, follows a successful lawyer whose desires and traumatic memories unsettle her poised public life. The review presents the film as an unconventional exploration of sexuality and gender expectations, and says Swinton’s distinctive performance marked her out as a screen presence unlike typical Hollywood leads.

Swinton plays Eve, who is having an affair with a seismologist while approaching a judicial appointment. A trip to help her sister, Maddie, after a shoplifting arrest brings Eve into contact with people and circumstances that force her to confront her past. The film adapts ideas from psychoanalyst Louise J Kaplan’s study of Emma Bovary, portraying so-called perversions as possible routes to pleasure and freedom from restrictive gender roles; it arrives on Mubi on 13 November.