Someone said that the woman couldn't have sex because she was afraid she'd turn into the leopard in the throws of passion? Is that just implied or was it said they'd never had sex in the movie?
shareIt's pretty well implied in the scene where they've only been married a short time, it's nighttime, she's on one side of the door and he's on the other. SHe pretty much spelled that out to him beforehand though, when she told him she still held these superstitions about people from her village.
"They're all gonna laugh at you! They're all gonna laugh at you!
There's a couple of very subtle lines of dialogue.
Before agreeing to go to therapy, Irena voices her envy of other women:
"They are happy. They make their husbands happy. They lead normal, happy lives."
Later Oliver admits to Alice:
"I have to touch her when she's near. But I don't really know her. In many ways we're strangers."
It takes a little reading between the lines to see the implications, but I think these lines combined with the visuals of the seperate bedrooms conveys the notion that they haven't consumated the marriage.
!!!!!!!!SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!!
Oliver and the Doctor discuss having the marriage annulled, this can only be done for an unconsumated marriage. On their wdding night she asks him to wait until she is ready and she goes into her bedroom alone.
Life isn't a rehearsal, so make this one your best performance
When the psychiatrist is chatting her he talks about how she is too scared to let him kiss her or she may turn into a panther. I was in doubt, but when that came up I thought it was pretty explicit
shareSomeone said that the woman couldn't have sex because she was afraid she'd turn into the leopard in the throws of passion?
Well, sure. It comes right after pitching woo.
Poe! You are...avenged!
I often throw my passion. I just threw a temper tantrum the other day.
shareNo way would any man marry a woman who has refused to let him kiss her after months of seeing each other. Let alone still refuse any slight kiss after getting married. And being married for a month with no kissing or intimacy whatsoever. No matter how much he loved her, his unrelenting patience is not believabe.
Nowadays and in the 1940's, people screwed around before getting married. This is how the world works and has always worked, despite how clean dated 1940's movies like this one depict the world. And it is dated. Too dated. But I'm not a milleniuim who refuses to watch old movies. The giant monster movies of the 1950's are amazing. I just saw "City Lights" from 1931 with Charlie Chaplan and loved it. And the silent "the Phantom of the Opera" and "The Hunchback of Notre Dam" films from the 1920's are great, too. While all these movies are undeniably dated, they are very watchable. So, dated goes two ways.
And Upon getting my hands on a lot of Criterion Collection movies lately, I was looking forward to "Cat People." I wasn't expecting gore and violence. I knew it was going to be somewhat dated and be talky. And up to a point, after the guy was married to the woman for a month with no kissing or anything at all, it was enjoyable and I was willing to go along with it. I did feel for the characters. But after more than a month of her shying away from her husband, come on. I did expect, perhaps, to see the screen-fading-in-and-out visual of the girl transforming into the panther, similar to Lon Cheney, Jr. in "The Wolfman." I get that the movie is all about sexual repression. Got that right away. It has the atmosphere and hidden themes, but it needed a little more more. A little something. A little action of some kind. Seeing the panther stalking them in the office was good, but not enough.
I still give the movie an above-average rating (**1/2 out of 4), but the film is too dated and has a premise that is, in fact, contrived and not believable. If the "Cat People" theme was re-worked in a different situation, it would be a different story. So people have a right to be critical of this movie. And people have a right to fully enjoy it. I'm glad they do.
Actually, I think the way they handled the non-consummation is kind of believable, given the times and censorship of the real issue. A straight man is madly in love and is fool enough to convince himself that a woman can't possibly mean what she says when she tells him that sex isn't going to be possible, he doesn't believe her and sort of assumes that if she takes her time to come around then he can wait. Because straight men just don't believe women when they say "no", they always assume it's some kind of game being played, and is leading up to the inevitable "yes". And of course she doesn't understand any of this, what does she know about heterosexuality? She's avoided it her whole life!
When it starts to sink in that she might actually mean "no" for real, first he takes her to a doctor and expects the doctor to fix everything, and when that happens he gets more and more interested in another woman, a woman who's normal and healthy. I don't know if the time frame of several weeks is realistic for the times, of course these days it'd be several hours.