But as the marriage progresses, Ace becomes more restrictive, beginning to try to regulate her as he does his business. However, this only leads to open rebellion on Ginger’s part. She takes up with her old lover, the sleazy Lester Diamond (James Woods), begins overindulging in drugs, and even has sex with Ace’s right-hand man—Nicky (Joe Pesci). Ace’s attempts to rein in this female force backfire as she becomes more violent and out of control, stealing from him and abandoning their child. Even though he eventually breaks with Ginger, she is partially responsible for his downfall and his arrest by the Feds.
In director Martin Scorsese’s Casino, Sharon Stone finally finds a femme fatale role that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will honor.
In The Specialist, May (Sharon Stone) finally meets her stalker, Ray (Sylvester Stallone).
Cosmetics company executive and super-femme fatale Laurel (Sharon Stone) takes on Catwoman (Halle Berry), in Catwoman.
In 1999, Stone remade the John Cassavetes’s film Gloria, starring his wife Gena Rowlands. Stone of course takes the Rowlands role of the title character: a tough-talking, sexy hustler who has made her living off the mob. When a neighbor boy’s family is murdered by the mob, Gloria takes the boy under her wing and ends up defending him against the gangsters as femme fatale turns unwilling mother.
The Halle Berry vehicle Catwoman (2004) allowed Stone to bring her ironic sense of humor to the role of the sympathetic villain, Laurel. She is an ex-model whose skin has turned to marble as a result of a dangerous beauty product her company developed. She is battling her partner/husband’s attempts to retire her for a younger model (in both senses of the word). In response she murders her husband and attempts to blame it on the title character: Catwoman.
Tia Carrere
—Eurasian Fever
Tia Carrere exemplifies the diverse multiethnic femme fatale who caters to the audience’s desire for the “alien” and “colorful.” Of Chinese, Spanish, and Filipino descent, Carrere early on in her career used this perceived mystique to give her femmes fatales more mystery. Taking advantage of the new freedoms allowed filmmakers in the last several decades, Carrere was known, like Stone, for her willingness to appear seminude in steamy love scenes which added to the sexual allure of her lethal ladies.
In 1989, she starred in a Spanish/U.S. coproduction called Fine Gold, the story of warring vintner families in Spain who let their desire for producing the finest product carry over into their personal relationships. Carrere played Stella who joined forces with the son (Michael, played by Andrew Stevens) in order to secure control of his father’s business as well as their rivals’ land. Stella used her uninhibited sexuality to keep Michael in line. In one scene, she seduces Michael in the family stables, telling him that the smell and sounds of the animals turn her on. Even when Michael’s sister catches them in the act, Stella refuses to cease and desist, and instead teases the sister for her prudishness. In another scene when Michael is showing cracks in his resolve, she lies on the bed and extends her legs and feet, signaling that he should undress her. As he does, she comforts him as a prelude to lovemaking.
In an episode of the TV show Married with Children (“Kelly Bounces Back”), Carrere plays the teen diva Piper Bauman, Kelly’s (Christina Applegate) ruthless competitor for the position of show model. She manipulates Kelly’s hormone-driven brother (David Faustino) with a promise that he can “touch her hair” in order to find Kelly’s performance secret in the competition.
James Cameron’s comic action film True Lies (1994), along with her earlier comedy Mike Myers’s Wayne’s World (1992)—where she is definitely not a femme fatale—helped catapult Carrere up several more rungs of the treacherous Hollywood ladder of success. In Cameron’s film, she portrays the villain Juno Skinner, who, for cash, is aiding a group of terrorists in a plot to blow up American targets. The erotic tango Carrere performed with secret agent Harry Tasker (Arnold Schwarzenegger) in the film has become a signature dance for the actress ever since.
Publicity photo of Tia Carrere around the time of True Lies.
Todd (Jason London) imagines his teacher’s wife—Vicky (Tia Carrere)—entering his bedroom and ravishing him, from My Teacher’s Wife.
Mistress Dark Pain (Tia Carrere) demands respect and obedience from her rich client in his hospital bed, from NiplTuck.
My Teacher’s Wife (1995) was a low-budget teen comedy with a good deal of maturity and less vulgarity than most of that period. In the movie Carrere is the neglected artistic wife, Vicky, of tyrannical math teacher Mr. Mueller (Christopher McDonald). The protagonist of the piece, high-school senior Todd Boomer (Jason London), meets Vicky when he picks her up after her car has broken down on the road. Like any testosterone-driven teen, he is immediately enraptured with this beautiful older woman. His eyes become large as saucers when she lasciviously licks the ice cream off her spoon at a diner to which he takes her. He dreams that she floats seductively into his bedroom at night. He imagines her mounting him and taking him forcefully. Vicky is the femme fatale of his adolescent fantasies. For in real life she is less of a femme fatale and more of a lonely wife with an abusive husband.
Although Vicky always maintains the audience’s sympathy with her encouraging attitude toward Todd (she tutors him in math) and long-suffering status at home, she still moves into the territory of femme fatale when she seduces the teenage boy to assuage her own lack of fulfillment. After several tentative kisses, where she resists her desire, she finally gives in and takes the boy after he has barked like a dog, which she finds irresistible.
The affair has consequences, of course. Mueller finds out and beats up Todd, then divorces Vicky—a consequence, she later admits, for which she is thankful. Now free, she can end her relationship with the boy and move to New York to continue her career as a sculptor. In the final analysis, like any self respecting femme fatale, Vicky has used her man in order to accomplish her ends.
In 1997, Carrere entered the world of sword and sorcery with her fiery performance as the sorceress queen Akivasha, based on novelist Robert E. Howard’s Kull the Conqueror books. Set in ancient times (much like Howard’s Conan films), Akivasha is the queen of Hades who has been imprisoned in her coffin for centuries. She is awakened by Enaros (Edward Tudor-Pole), a wizard who bears the marks of the fire on his body as he had masochistically tried to embrace the flame which fed as well as symbolized Akivasha. In cahoots with General Taligaro (Thomas Ian Griffith), Enaros brings back the queen to help overthrow the upstart Kull (Kevin Sorbo), who has succeeded to the throne.
However, neither man understands the power of what they have revivified. After spreading the contents of the queen’s own blood over her mummy, Akivasha rises nude from the grave. She is stunning, with red hair, symbolizing the fire she draws her strength from. At first, she is a little disoriented, almost like a child. But within a few scenes she is ordering her associates and followers around, including Enaros, who is her personal whipping boy—alternately burned and verbally abused by the demanding queen.
Having established her authority, she then proceeds to put Kull under her spell by appearing veiled at a ceremony at which Kull is to choose his queen. When he removes her veil, her beauty transfixes him and he marries her immediately. Their wedding night is filled with ecstasy and passion, as Akivasha makes up for centuries of deprivation. She is taken with Kull’s sexual prowess. So, instead of killing him, she puts him into a catatonic state and makes the man her prisoner, sure that he will remain her love slave.
Kull escapes and begins a battle to regain his throne. He soon learns that he can only destroy Akivasha with the breath of ice. So he travels north to obtain this weapon. His final confrontation with Akivasha is particularly engaging and unusual. As Akivasha bathes in the sacred flame, she reveals her primal self, which is a monster/demon from hell. Realizing he can only transmit the breath of ice to her with a kiss, he approaches the creature as it beckons him and with a kiss freezes the queen.
Tia C
arrere expands her horizons by performing as a singer, here in a classic femme fatale dress and torch-song stance.
Tia Carrere as professor and adventurer Sydney Fox from the TV series Relic Hunter.
Kull (Kevin Sorbo) is no match for the queen of fire (Tia Carrere), from Kull the Conqueror.
Carrere secured a TV series of her own in 1999. In Relic Hunter, she portrayed Sydney Fox, an adventuress and professor modeled after Lara Croft, Tomb Raider. Although she was more of a warrior woman, like Croft, than a femme fatale, there were episodes where she used her sexuality and her cunning to subvert the villains of the piece.
In 2007 Carrere appeared on the popular Dancing with the Stars TV show and performed to the delight of the audience her erotic tango from True Lies. She also appeared briefly in the series Nip/Tuck as a dominatrix named Mistress Dark Pain who visits a client in the hospital for a session. She is rudely interrupted by one of the doctors who is appalled when she applies fishing hooks to her slave’s nipples and pulls at them violently. She rudely tells the doctor that she is in control here and puts both men in their composite place before she leaves.
Always looking for new avenues of creativity, Carrere has recently launched a singing career, making appearances throughout the world.
Li Gong
—The Asian Femme Fatale
Femmes fatales in Asian culture are less common than in the West. Part of the reason is of course the Western dualistic view of good and evil and its tendency to associate women with evil. Asian culture and religion has a much more balanced view of morality, realizing that good and evil are often part of the same mandala—yin and yang—and harder to differentiate.
However, there have been a few Asian actresses who have made a mark in the area of femme fatale iconography. Chinese actress Li Gong is the most important of these women.
Li Gong introduced her first femme fatale character to the screen in director Yimou Zhang’s unofficial adaptation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice—Ju Dou (1990). As the title character, Li Gong traces the development of a femme fatale from abused wife to empowered, lethal female. Ju Dou is married to a sadistic dye factory owner, Yang (Wei Li), who has already buried two other wives he abused both verbally and physically. He continues his ways with Ju Dou as we see him tying her up and beating her, blaming her for not producing a son.
Ju Dou begins to sense her strength when her husband’s “nephew,” Tianqing (Baotian Li), becomes obsessed with his aunt—spying on her as she washes, staring up at her as she crosses over the multicolored cloths hanging to dry, and exchanging furtive glances with this beautiful woman. After brazenly undressing while he is spying and thereby revealing her bruises, she becomes even more aggressive, attacking him sexually, like a “wolf” (her words) as her sexual desires are awakened. They make love among the colored cloths and pools of dye.
The lovers soon become even more blatant in their lovemaking. When Ju Dou finds herself pregnant by Tianqing, she deceives the husband, telling him it is his child. The lovers’ opportunity to ramp up their relationship comes when Yang falls from his donkey and becomes paralyzed. Ju Dou sees this as her chance to pay back her husband for years of abuse and so flaunts her relationship while her husband is housed in a bucket on wheels. But when Yang takes to trying to smother the child and then later burn down the factory, Ju Dou demands that her lover kill the “mad old man.” Tianqing cannot gather the courage to perform this act, even though Ju Dou scolds him for his cowardice and even beats him out of frustration.
The Empress Phoenix (Li Gong) decked out in gold for her personal and political battle with her husband, from Curse of the Golden Flower.
The emperor (Yun-Fat Chow) tries to direct his wife’s hand in calligraphy, a symbol of his futile attempt to dominate her, in Curse of the Golden Flower.
Ju Dou does finally get her wish. Her son, while playing, accidentally knocks his foster father Yang into a pool of dye, and the man drowns. In this manner, the boy unconsciously frees his natural parents to be as brazen as they choose. However, when child grows up he turns into a duplicate of his foster father rather than his real father. He angrily separates his mother and her lover, finally killing Tianqing by drowning him. In anguish, Ju Dou sets fire to the factory.
By 1998 Li Gong was the premiere female star in China, with significant worldwide recognition. She was idolized for her grace, beauty, and emotional range; but she did not return to the femme fatale archetype again until director Kaige Chen’s historical /adventure epic The Emperor and the Assassin. In this tale the king of Qin (Xuejian Li) wishes to expand his power and unite all of China under his rule. Lady Zhao (Li Gong), his lover since childhood, plots with him to seize the kingdom of Yan through manipulation rather than naked aggression.
Lady Zhao pretends that she has been exiled to Yan and there, acting as an agent provocateur, convinces the prince of Yan (Zhou Sun) that the king of Qin is planning an invasion. Hearing of a disaffected swordsman named Jing Ke (Fengyi Zhang), Lady Zhao finds him and through a combination of sexual enticement and appeals to his humanity enlists him in her phony plot. However, as Lady Zhao begins to hear more and more of her lover’s newest acts of tyranny, she begins to reconsider whether or not to go on with the mission. These moral considerations, combined with her attraction to the Zen-like swordsman, color the last hour of this epic.
Li Gong as the violent and jealous geisha Hatsumomo, from Memoirs of a Geisha.
After working with two of the most prestigious mainland Chinese directors, Yimou Zhang and Kaige Chen, Li Gong aligned herself with the younger, more experimental Hong Kong director Kar Wai Wong for her next two femme fatale roles. In the director’s 2046 (2004), Li Gong has small but significant role as Su Li Zhen, a gambler who not only resembles the protagonist Chow’s (Tony Leung) lost love, but also shares her name. Su Li always dresses in black, hence her nickname “Black Spider,” and refuses to remove her glove from her right hand, a symbol of her own secret. Consequently, Chow and Su Li form a brief bond that ends ambiguously.
In the omnibus film Eros, also in 2004, Kar Wai Wong directs the episode entitled “The Hand.” Li Gong plays Miss Hua, an arrogant and high-priced courtesan, who enjoys her power over men. When a handsome and timid tailor comes to her apartment to work on a dress, she decides to seduce him so that he will become her regular dressmaker. As she lies back in her bed, her face haughty yet sensual, she gives the tailor, who refuses to make eye contact with her, a hand job, bringing him to orgasm.
From then on the enraptured tailor works tirelessly to design her the most beautiful of dresses. Over the years, he listens as he waits patiently, always with eyes downcast, to her lovemaking as well as her arguments with her clients. He lives only for the moment when she tries on the dress and he can alter it on her body as she ignores him, indulging rather in daydreams or impassioned phone conversations with her lovers.
As time passes and Miss Hua begins to age and fall sick, her high-class clientele disappear and are replaced by drunken men she picks up on the streets. Zhang of course remains faithful, still altering and designing clothes for her. As Miss Hua lies sick in her bed, she finally engages in a heartfelt conversation with her servant and allows him, somewhat hesitatingly, intimacies, realizing that he is the only man who has remained faithful to her.
The haughty empress (Li Gong) lets her hair down as she tries to win back her son/lover in Curse of the Golden Flower.
Realizing Li Gong’s international appeal, in 2005 DreamWorks Studio cast the actress in their adaptation of the bestseller Memoirs of a Geisha. Li Gong, as the violent and jealous geisha Hatsumomo, stole the movie from its star Ziyi Zhang, who played the protagonist Sayuri. From the first moments the young Sayuri is brought to the geisha house as a trainee, Hatsumomo, the premiere geisha, resents her. She sees in her a potential rival and so goes out of her way to sabotage her future. At first, she makes the girl her servant, ordering her on errands and treating her with disdain. And later when Sayuri
gains the favor of an accomplished geisha, Hatsumomo becomes even more bitter and vengeful.
Hatsumomo is of course driven by more than just jealousy. She has a lover whom she sees in secret because the “owner” of the geishas refuses to allow her a romantic liaison not involving money. Sayuri’s rise to prominence along with her own concurrent descent drives her to distraction. In a drunken rage, she sets the geisha house ablaze.
Coming off the personal success of Memoirs of a Geisha, director Michael Mann cast Li Gong as the cool and sultry Isabella in his neo-noir Miami Vice (2006). Isabella is a member of the drug cartel Detective Crockett (Colin Farrell) and his partner Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) are trying to dismember . Crockett cannot resist Isabella, even though it is a clear violation of protocol. They form an intense sexual relationship which Mann spends a healthy section of the movie developing in intimate detail.
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