The Notorious Bettie Page—about the pinup and soft-core-bondage film and magazine star of the 50s—mixes archival black-and-white and color footage with re-creations. The mix of materials evoking the period is far from seamless, and we can’t always be sure what’s archival and what’s simulated because sometimes the filmmakers are trying to fool us. But their preoccupation with the manufacture of images keeps this exercise in exposure and concealment interesting.
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The film hints that Page, who grew up in Nashville, may have been the victim of family abuse, and it makes clear that she was gang-raped. But it tells us nothing about her sex life, before or after her return to religion, which is odd, given that director Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol, American Psycho), who wrote the script with Guinevere Turner (Go Fish), wants to unpack 50s sexual ideology as well as revel in it.
Harron and Turner’s version of a sexpot is the opposite of Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone), the sexpot in Basic Instinct (1992) and its recent sequel. She’s a phallic, brainy, and possibly murderous superwoman, though she’s as much the product of mythology and the puritanical imagination as Harron and Turner’s Page. It could be argued that both myths—the brainless sexpot and the sexpot genius—reflect a hysterical male response to female sexuality. One main difference is that Tramell knows she’s a fantasy and uses this knowledge to taunt her victims while happily screwing everyone in sight, women as well as men.
In Basic Instinct 2 Stone plays Tramell with as much style and relish as before, and that’s reason enough to see the film. Yet the response of some viewers has been more over-the-top than anything in the movie. Manohla Dargis in the New York Times called it a “prime object lesson in the degradation that can face Hollywood actresses, especially those over 40,” contrasting Stone’s performance here with her turn as Laura in last year’s Broken Flowers, where she was “luminous and touching…partly because the role called for her to act her age, and she happily complied.” I can’t fathom what’s degrading about Stone still being sexy at 47, but Dargis seems to be saying that Laura is past her sexual prime and therefore can be “luminous and touching,” whereas Catherine—who always has been and always will be a fantasy bitch goddess—is still in her prime and therefore can’t be even close to 47. That attitude would surely resonate with the teenage demographic.
Directed by Mary Harron
Written by Harron and Guinevere Turner
With Gretchen Mol, Chris Bauer, Jared Harris, Sarah Paulson, Cara Seymour, David Strathairn, Lili Taylor, and John Cullum
Basic Instinct 2 ★★★ (Worth seeing)
Directed by Michael Caton-Jones
Written by Leora Barish and Henry Bean
With Sharon Stone, David Morrissey, David Thewlis, Charlotte Rampling, Hugh Dancy, Flora Montgomery, Indira Varma, and Heathcoate Williams
