‘A remarkably conventional morality tale’: Thelma and Louise reviewed in 1991

The film might be subtitled “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun with Guns”. From its very first scene, Thelma & Louise is constructed as an anthology of phallic symbolism, with cigarettes and pistols counterpointed against a ceaseless visual refrain of genito-urinary references: driving rain, crop dusting, spewing oil derricks, sundry episodes of Ridley Scott-trademark steam and, as a ubiquitous leitmotif, background figures with gushing hoses. From a screenplay by female scriptwriter Callie Khouri, Scott has fashioned a remarkably conventional morality tale about sex and drink, rock and roads.

The tone is set in the opening scenes, which serve to caricature the dull routines and unfulfilling relationships from which the women seek escape on a weekend break. Susan Sarandon, waitressing once again as in White Palace, admonishes a customer for smoking – “Ruins your sex drive” – before lighting up herself behind the scenes. Thelma guiltily tucks into a chocolate bar after a spat with her carpet-salesman husband (whose scarlet Corvette bears the registration “The 1”, in case the preceding exchange hasn’t sufficiently underlined his egotism). During preparations for departure, the women’s domestic interiors are lovingly examined: dark and cluttered, or at least enclosed, they offer contrast to the forthcoming ‘wide open spaces’.

But – no doubt the legacy of Scott’s background in advertising – these homes come across more directly as set dressers’ dreams. The sorting of clothing becomes a commercials-style scrutiny of material: possessions as metaphors for personality. At first glance, this road movie-cum-chase thriller seems to applaud Thelma and Louise for their audacity, in breaking loose from their stifling life styles and then, as assaults and incidents pile up, in staying the course and keeping one step ahead of the law. But, not far beneath the shiny surface, lies a much more ambivalent, indeed covertly repressive attitude towards women who take their lives into their own hands.

The supposed freedom of the open road – hitherto an essentially masculine domain – is shown to be perilously compromised for women. In repaying male sexual abuse with a show of ‘unexpected’ female aggression, the heroines find themselves initially distraught, then – once they have each taken possession of a gun – empowered and exultantly defiant. But they are eventually outstrengthed by the sheer amount of weaponry which men can muster. The obligatory display of hardware — menacing helicopters, a battery of flashing blue lights , close-ups of fingers releasing safety catches — precedes a moment of tearful female bonding before the girls decide to “keep on goin”’. In a scene that reprises the closing moments of Blade Runner, they dive over a precipice into a freeze frame (the road movie that never ends…), leaving plenty of issues suspended in mid-air.

Given the high-grade cardboard from which their characters are made, Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon get good mileage out of their roles. But, larded with product placement, the film’s visual style is not as far removed from Scott’s previous work as the outdoor settings might suggest. The one moment of cinematic bravura comes during the women’s drive through the Painted Desert. Resisting the temptation to provide yet another package-tour panorama, Scott shoots the scene by night. With the rockfaces glowing in the background, and the heroines speeding behind an incandescent windshield, it is a brief poetic reminder that cinema exploits similar principles to tourism: son et lumiere. 

 ► Thelma and Louise returns to select UK cinemas 2 June.