MOVIE REVIEW : ‘SWF’ Finds Roomie Who Splits More Than Rent

If you’ve frequented the likes of “Fatal Attraction,” “Pacific Heights,” “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” or “Unlawful Entry,” you’re all too familiar with Hollywood’s latest fixation: the deranged obsessive.

Well, the deranged obsessive is back. This time, she’s a roomie .

We’ve had the lover from hell, the tenant from hell, the nanny from hell, the cop from hell. In “Single White Female” (citywide), frumpy Hedra Carlson (Jennifer Jason Leigh), moves in with chic Allison Jones (Bridget Fonda) and mutates into a demonic revenger. A shame, too, because, up until the point that the film goes wacko, there are some fine, offhanded moments between the two actresses. Leigh and Fonda strike the sort of connections that you don’t often get to see in films about women’s lives; the mixture of tentativeness and affection and guile in their roomie relationship has the kind of shadings that deserve a richer scenario. Why is it that nowadays subtlety and “softness” can only be justified in movies that come to a horrific end?

Allison breaks it off with her philandering fiance (Steven Weber) at the start of the film and advertises for a roommate to cover the cost of her apartment. Even though she works as some kind of free-lance software analyst, she manages to dress in the crispiest new styles, and her digs, while we are informed that they are rent-controlled, are spacious enough to house the Queen of Sheba. Any movie that features a “struggling” Manhattan career woman living like Yoko Ono is not a movie to believe. Why should we trust its psychological insights when its lifestyle insights are so screwy?

The blind spots in Don Roos’ scenario, which was directed by Barbet Schroeder, extend beyond the practical. Allison, despite her chic exterior, is supposed to be so emotionally needy that she can’t recognize Hedra’s psycho-mania. Since Hedra at first comes on like a mousy dweeb, Allison’s mistake is understandable; still, the pairing seems like a matter of plot convenience. With characters this sketchy, how can we determine whether they fill each other’s emotional needs or not?

The actresses knock themselves out to fill in the sketch. Fonda, sporting a cropped carrot-topped bob, is such a wizardly performer that she can transmit in a glance Allison’s discomfort with her own sporty image. Her enameled, dressed-for-success facade is familiar urban career-woman armor; Fonda shows us how Allison could feel trapped inside it. Fonda has the rare ability to be simultaneously tough-minded and vulnerable, almost yearningly so. (It’s a gift she shares with her aunt, Jane Fonda, at her best.) She has everything it takes right now to be a major actress--and a major star--except the all-important catapulting role.

Leigh is almost as remarkably talented, which is why, when Hedra starts clonking Allison’s various suitors and protectors and pets with spiked heels and 2-by-4s and door jambs, the film never quite devolves into campiness--though it should. Leigh gives Hedra’s worried weirdness a wavering ambiguity; she claims to be a surviving twin at birth, and her attempts to twin herself to Allison, to become her double, have a combustible pathos. Hedra’s effort is bound to fail, and, as the failure sinks in, she can’t hold her act together anymore. She sends out smoke signals of distress--little puffs of rage.

Schroeder has a gift for allusive, mysterioso sequences, and he brings off a few in “Single White Female”: a scene where Allison, having just made love to her boyfriend, listens to Hedra masturbating in her bedroom; the horrifying, split-second moment, in a beauty salon, when Allison recognizes how far Hedra’s twinship fantasy has progressed. (The R rating is for strong sexuality, language and violence.) But Schroeder is too fine-tuned a director for this roomie-from-hell claptrap, and his attempts to work in references to Polanski’s films or to Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” only reinforce the pulpiness.

There’s also something inherently queasy about the way the film equates emotional nakedness with emotional weakness, as if a person’s desire to bond with another was some kind of infirmity. “Single White Female” makes it seem like any woman who feels incomplete in her aloneness is stunted and ripe for a drubbing.

‘Single White Female’

Bridget Fonda: Allison Jones

Jennifer Jason Leigh: Hedra Carlson

Steven Weber: Sam Rawson

Peter Friedman: Graham Knox

A Columbia release. Producer-director Barbet Schroeder. Executive producer Jack Baran. Screenplay Don Roos, based on the novel “SWF Seeks Same” by John Lutz. Cinematographer Luciano Tovoli. Editor Lee Percy. Costumes Eileen Kennedy. Music Howard Shore. Production design Milena Canonero. Art director P. Michael Johnston. Set decorator Anne H. Ahrens. Sound Petur Hliddal. Running time: 1 hour, 47 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (strong sexuality, language and violence).