HEAVENLY CREATURES

Admittedly provocative and gripping, this disturbing New Zealand tale of matricide is also a drama that broadly associates lesbian desire and love with gruesome violence.

"Based on a true story" (in reality, freely based on the diaries of one of the girls), this film tells of the intense and passionate relationship of 1950s teenagers Pauline Parker and Julie Hulme, and alliance that leads to the grisly murder of Pauline's mother.

Their friendship is the core of the film. The teenage girls are immediately attracted to each other, but what begins as normal female bonding soon escalates into emotional and physical love, a state of desire (in the film's eyes) that inevitably leads to self-destruction.

An extremely well-made film whose theme of equating lesbianism with violence make it very unsettling. The Julie character in real life received a prison sentence, was released and moved to Britain, where she gained success as a writer under the pen name Anne Perry.

In interviews after the film was released, Perry took great pains to claim that it was far from a truthful account of the events, and she also denied that sexuality ever played a part in their relationship, and that it was just an invention of the heterosexual director.