In 1972, the Iranian-born director Barbet Schroeder, along with an up-and-coming cinematograher named Nestor Almendros (who would later gain wide acclaim working with the likes of Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and Terrence Malick), journeyed to the wilds of New Guinea to shoot his second low-budget feature, La Vallee (The Valley Obscured By Clouds), a cliche-heavy, sexually provocative confection about a motley group of alternative lifestyle, Anglo-French hippies searching for spiritual enlightenment in the titular valley but finding only their boring bourgeois neuroses. Despite wide exposure at film festivals and on the art-house circuit, the film is best known today for its trippy Pink Floyd soundtrack. Schroeder's subsequent films, however, particularly the controversial 1974 documentary Idi Amin Dada and the kinky sado-masochistic expose Maitresse in 1975, quickly alerted him to a wider international audience. Watching Single White Female, Schroeder's third American film (following Barfly and the Oscar-honored Reversal Of Fortune) and his most blatantly commercial, one can't help thinking how seemingly easy it appears to have been for this auteur to surrender/adapt his European artistic sensibilities to the demands of mainstream Hollywood.
Adapted for the screen by Don Roos and John Lutz from Lutz's novel SWF Seeks Same, the film is an exploitative, urban psycho-thriller featuring Bridget Fonda as a young New York fashion designer who discovers that the young woman she has signed up to share her apartment (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is actually a mentally compromised, knife-wielding loon straight out of the Norman Bates playbook. With efficiently calibrated performances from Fonda and Leigh, Schroeder's deployment of light and shadow, a muted colour scheme and an escalating sense of dread deftly enliven the film's calculated Grand Guignol flourishes, and the inevitable bloody finale has crowd-pleaser written all over it.
