Wretch on a Sexual Rampage

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

As usual, conventional wisdom has it all wrong. The problem is not that they don't write good roles for women anymore; it's that they only write roles for good women. Actresses still get to suffer nobly and ignobly. They are even allowed to be brave and capable. But down-and-dirty wickedness is denied them. It's not nice.

It's all part of the new prissiness. But evil has traditionally been an equal-opportunity employer. Where would Barbara Stanwyck and the other ladies of the noir have been if their only subtext had been female victimization? Every once in a while a girl has to stop brooding over gender injustice, start thinking about sexual revenge, and slip into her thigh-highs and stiletto heels to lure a few dopes to destruction.

There has always been something bracing about such creatures, especially when no whiny attempts are made to justify their malignity. The grace that redeems a wretch like Bridget Gregory (Linda Fiorentino) in The Last Seduction is her breathtaking lack of hypocrisy. She's economic woman on an intricate and divinely sociopathic rampage. She just plain wants the money she steals from her husband (Bill Pullman), who obtained it in a drug deal that she had urged on him. She just plain needs to create a new life so she can hide from his wrath. And she just plain must enlist simple Mike Swale (Peter Berg) as an accomplice in murder when her mate finally catches up with her.

There's no guise -- fighting feminist or yuppie careerist, prudish housewife | or pouty adolescent, barroom slut or abused bride -- that Bridget won't assume to win this game. Her quick changes are funny. So is her chilly single- mindedness. And so is the eagerness of males, stupefied by lust, to be taken in by her. Fiorentino is ferociously good in the role. If first-time screenwriter Steve Barancik conceived it as a parody of have-it-all feminism, this actress doesn't acknowledge it. She's after the humor of humorlessness, the nuttiness of self-interest untrammeled by sentiment -- and she nails it.

Similarly, director John Dahl is after something more than a nostalgic evocation of the old film noir style. He can light a mean street, a smoky barroom or a morning-after bedroom in the best tradition of the genre. But these venues are no longer situated in a big city. Dahl's Red Rock West, released earlier this year, was set in a dour little Western town. Seduction mostly takes place in a small, upstate New York town. What Dahl is saying is that you can perhaps avoid becoming a crime statistic by living in the boondocks, but that evil, in the larger sense, is everywhere and inescapable.

Not that he would ever put that point so crudely. Dahl is a cool, even reticent filmmaker, however complicated his plots, however hot and basic the emotions that drive them. But that's a virtue these days. A lot of directors are drawn to the classic genres, but few of them seem to have any real confidence in their strengths. Their tendency is to overheat, and in the process overexpand, these projects. Dahl lets his loony material speak for itself. He understands that overdirecting is like overacting; it pushes us away instead of drawing us in.