Red Menace

SPOTLIGHT

no Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh weren't separated at birth. It is only through the miracle of modem hairstyling that they appear Siamese. In Barbet Schroederis latest spooker, Single White Female, the two actresses act out that classic cautionary tale of urban folklore, the Roommate from Hell story. At first everything is milk and cookies. After dynamic Fonda accepts dowdy Leigh into her rentcontrolled crib, they undergo intense bonding, shopping and cooking together, sharing the care. But when Leigh comes home from the salon one day sporting a matching haircut, the movie steps into the sinister mirror of identity snatching: I am you/you are me. Schroeder, who turned the Claus von Biilow trial into a witty gavotte in Reversal of Fortune, describes S.W.F. as Bergman's Persona crossed with Hitchcock and Polanski. But it sounds more like Robert Altman's 3 Women minus the Jungian fish imagery. Like 3 Women (with Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall), S.W.F. sports an interesting team. A southern belle in Shag and a reporter in Godfather III, Bridget Fonda carries her bones as if she were balancing knives. Leigh, however, is a consummate sponge, her pores sopping up the poison-mushroom atmosphere of Last Exit to Brooklyn and Rush. Her soft absence feeding off of Fonda's sharp presence should offer a psych lesson in parasite sisterhood. "I" is an illusion, say their becalmed eyes. At the bottom of every soul is a blank.

JAMES WOLCOTT