Cat People: Jacques Tourneur

[Revisit Review]

There was always a scene of dialogue in Jacques Tourneur's Cat People that struck me as unnecessary and superfluous. It was the scene where Oliver Reed confesses to Alice Moore that he was flummoxed by his marital difficulties with Irena Dubrovna. He explains that he didn't know how to react because he "had never been unhappy before." But this time around, that conversation hit me a different way. See, this is a few scenes before Oliver and Alice confess their love for each other and Oliver confronts Irena with desires for a divorce. Then it hit me: Irena was always a means to an end for Oliver. She made him happy. But as soon as she became a liability, he wanted to get rid of her. I began to think of Irena not as a hapless victim, but as a tragic hero. Her magical powers were her ethnic identity which she surrendered to live in the West, much like her ancestors when confronted with the "civilizing" sword of King John of Serbia and Christendom (note the scene near the end where Oliver and Alice use an impromptu cross to keep Irene from attacking them). And then I realized the kicker: Irene was totally within her right to be suspicious and jealous of Alice. Stalking her before she officially hooked up with Oliver was perhaps a bit too much, but after her break-up I sympathized with her anger and fury towards the people who used her up and threw her away like a ball of trash. In addition to being a psychological fable of repressed female sexuality, Cat People can be viewed as a metaphor for how the West exploits and abandons ethnic "others."

10/10