She Must Be Seeing Things

A lawyer with too much time on her hands runs across her lover's diary while straightening the woman's apartment in "She Must Be Seeing Things." What she finds in that volume unleashes intricate fantasies of jealousy and revenge.

While Agatha (Sheila Dabney) uses the diary to probe into her partner's past, Jo (Lois Weaver) spends long nights in the production of a low-budget docudrama she is shooting about the life of Catalina de Erauso, a Spanish woman in the 15th Century who was given a special dispensation by the Pope to dress as a man.

Agatha objectifies her partner in wild whims of desire as she pours over her beloved's diary and looks at the pictures of men, Jo's former sex partners, stuck within the pages. In scenes which we can never distinguish as reality, Agatha attempts to possess Jo by stalking her and imagining her murder.

In this early example of independent lesbian cinema, writer/director Sheila McLaughlin proves that the male gaze is not unique to male filmmakers. The film was "deeply controversial" when it was first screened in the late 1980s because it flew in the face of many feminist ideals.

The film is filled with many tropes of genre fiction -- horror and suspense -- and it makes the most of the Hollywood convention of equating eroticism with violence. This made some feminist theorists dismiss "She Must Be Seeing Things" as pornography (a word that had no positive connotations at the time).

Themes of obsessive love are commingled with camp, phallocentric images and purposefully stereotypical gender exploration.

Though the images are fascinating, the dialogue is ridiculously stilted and over talky to the point that the acting is forced and unnatural when the characters are speaking. Yet when the actors are unrestrained by the dialogue, they can be free and ebullient with playful eroticism.

This DVD has especially exciting bonus materials: The short film "Inside Out" and an hour long interview with Sheila McLaughlin.

"She Must Be Seeing Things"
DVD
Not Rated / 94 minutes
FirstRunFeatures.com