“We make our own choices, we pay our own prices.”
Welcome to Harbour Highlights, a series of cult and classic films, handpicked by the staff of Harbour Lights. For Southampton Pride, Anastasia is revisiting the indelible pairing of Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly in the Wachowski’s debut film Bound.
Following on from a screenwriting career, the Wachowskis came up with the concept of Bound partly as a way to show what they could do as directors. Sprung from their love of noir films and their thinking of how easy it is to make false assumptions about a woman’s sexuality, the pair created a twisted Billy Wilder homage featuring Corky (Gershon) and Violet (Tilly), two women who fall in love and decide to rob Violet’s mafioso boyfriend (Joe Pantoliano).
A crime thriller that’s sexy, stylish and cool beyond measure, Bound created one of the great screen lesbian pairings and ranks as one of the essential works in the ‘be gay, do crime’ subgenre. The film – which Pantoliano called “One of my favourite experiences in my film library” (in response to a Harbour Lights Facebook post, no less) – gained a passionate cult fanbase as both a noir thriller and a mainstream LGBT film and was directly responsible for the Wachowskis getting to make another sexy and cool thriller featuring Pantoliano – 1999’s The Matrix. Whether you want to see the origins of their work pre-Neo or revisit one of the greatest crime films of the 90s, Bound is well worth a big screen viewing.
