A Film Canon

It's hard to review Jade without describing the ending, since that's what ultimately distinguishes it from the pale repetition of Basic Instinct it might have been. Suffice to say that screenwriter Joe Eszterhas opens, once again, with a murder scene that appears to be the culmination of some kind of sexual exchange. Friedkin then takes the parameters of this scene - its Asian and exotic decor, curatorial hush, tastefully muted tropical tones and the tracking-shots that elaborate it - as the basis of his directorial aesthetic, building a sultry, death-driven eroticism that points towards femme fatale 'Jade' (Linda Fiorentino), a business psychologist-turned insatiable, kinky prostitute, as prime suspect. By concluding the film, somewhat abruptly, with Jade's husband's (Chazz Palminteri) deadpan confession of the murder as an attempt to protect his wife's reputation - and, critically, his complete failure to explain or even reference the fact that the murder presented itself as a sexual act - Friedkin and Eszterhas provide a poetic and original deconstruction of noir masculinity. Despite the furtive male gazes that couch Detective David Corelli's (David Caruso) subsequent investigation, there's less a sense that either victim or perpetrator were 'gay' than as a prescience of the way in which a certain kind of violence between men that is ostensibly about defending their access to female pleasure can proliferate into a quite different kind of proximity, access and pleasure, powerful because unformulated. It's this undermining of the femme fatale function, and the resultant, anticlmactic sense that a twist has been denied the audience, that constitutes the real twist of the film. It's also what ultimately makes Jade such an outstanding genre piece, insofar as it presents noir - and genre generally - as a repetition of exception, as false attention to a constitutive blind spot.