THOUGH MADE IN 1995 and only now (May '97) coming to San Jose, this film looks more like something made in 1970. For a time, peaking about that year, Hollywood seemed to think the only movies that could break even were Disney kids' flicks and films about subjects then deemed unsuitable for television. So they made deep inside psychological studies of people in conflict, with lots of non-genital nudity and obscene language. Then along came Jaws, and Hollywood for the most part came back to its senses. But besides the offbeat subject and offbeat treatment, this film even has a guy in fake tie-dye jeans of a kind seen lately only in revivals of Hair.

This is basically the story of a power woman attorney up for an appointment as appeals court judge, whose kleptomaniac sister "borrows" her lucky suit on the day she's to be intereviewed by the governor, ruining her chances of fulfilling her dream since age six of being able to work in a black robe with nothing on underneath. For this, she's about to kill her sister.

There are shades of Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers here (but that was a great movie), "straight" sex as explicit as you can get with an R rating from the MPAA, and lesbian liasons that would push the envelope if male censors weren't always somehow strangely more tolerant of those. What the point of it all is, I haven't a clue. The klepto sister passes her Ph.D. finals on her study of female perversions at UCLA; maybe that's what you have to have to get it. I passed my M.A. finals at UCLA and left it at that, which is probably why I don't. Or maybe it's just that I'm not female.