Abstract
Mona Demarkov (Lena Olin), a smoulderingly beautiful mobster in a tight, pinstriped dress, sits down on a straight- backed chair and opens her legs. Jack Grimaldi (Gary Oldman), the NYPD sergeant assigned to guard her, is enraptured. He gazes at her stocking- clad inner thighs and into the shadowy realm that lies between them. Mona offers him far more than a fleeting glimpse. Seconds tick by and tension builds, until she cuts into Jack’s reverie by murmuring, “It’s not polite to stare.” This snippet from Romeo is Bleeding 1 is a minor landmark in cinema history. It is one of the first, and indeed few, moments in mainstream film where a lead actress adopts such an indecorous pose and unabashedly displays her vulva – lingerie- clad, in this instance – to the hungry eyes of a male co- star. In 1992, Basic Instinct 2 had caused a sensation with a similar scene in which Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) crosses and uncrosses her legs, showing her unquestionably naked vulva to a pack of decidedly uneasy police interrogators. As Amy Taubin argues, with a playful nod to Freudian and Lacanian theories of the unconscious, the men who look upon Tramell’s genitals are “faced with a cunt no one could mistake for a lack.” 3 Like Basic Instinct, Romeo is Bleeding fashions the vulva into an icon of power and identifies it as a locus of female strength. Mona is an aggressive, controlling figure at all times. Even with her legs apart, she is no pushover. Her seated body – palms placed firmly on top of thighs, torso erect, eyes locked unswervingly upon Jack – bespeaks solidity and watchfulness, not the precariousness and airy indifference of an object- of- the- gaze. She looks ready to pounce. Romeo is Bleeding shares Basic Instinct’s interest in “the power of pussy,” as a contemporaneous rock album would have it. 4 But the movie is far more than the tale of a femme fatale whose potency emanates from between her legs. It is cinema’s most detailed and erudite
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