As with so many things about sex, the British supply a foreign euphemism by using the term “femmes fatales”. It’s like “boudoir” and “brassiere” — these seem to be evasive words for us Brits. And I think we are quite confused about what a femme fatale really is.
Let’s take Carmen as the pre-eminent femme fatale — if you have an affair with her, it’s trouble. She will fall in love, she will love you for a brief period, but entirely on her own terms, and then she’ll drop you. And that, it seems to me, is a femme fatale — a woman who is sexually in control. Does it always end in tragedy? It always seems to in drama and fiction. Yet all of my examples are really male conceits: these women, such as Carmen and Salome, are dreamt up by men and there’s no male femme fatale equivalent. Eye candy? Or women might say “Oh, he’s trouble”, but that’s not an archetype.
Ultimately, calling a woman a femme fatale is convenient and rather lazy. The one I’ve been most recently involved with is Puccini’s Manon Lescaut. She becomes corrupted by wealth and greed, but finally she opts for sex. She loves sex. And I think that’s the unspoken fear behind the creation of a femme fatale — that you’re going to be unmanned by the sexuality of a woman.
I simply can’t think of a modern femme fatale. Perhaps that’s because sexual mystery seems to be a thing of the past. If there’s no withholding then there’s nothing to be revealed.
Manon Lescaut: Live in HD is broadcast on March 5 at 5.55pm in selected cinemas (metopera.org/uk )
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Bizet’s Carmen
She’s someone who absolutely lives by her own rules. She chooses her sexual partners and she insists on how the relationship is conducted and how long it is sustained. That’s normally a male characteristic.
Lana Turner, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)
Turner’s character falls for a drifter, they have a passionate affair and then plan together to kill her husband. Turner and John Garfield get as near as you can to explicit sex without showing any body parts. She’s nuclear in her sexual energy.
Strauss’s Salome
She’s attracted by John the Baptist’s goodness and wants to subvert his virtue. When he rejects her he gets his head cut off. I don’t have much sympathy for her — she needs her bottom smacked.
Ava Gardner, The Killers (1946)
The two killers of the title kill a man who doesn’t resist — then they discover that there is a woman who he was in love with, who betrayed him. For me Gardner was the most gorgeous movie heroine of all.
Puccini’s Manon Lescaut
Her downfall is her love of sex — which matures into a romantic passion with Des Grieux. In the third act of the opera, you see her lumped in with the women who are victims of men who have paid to have sex with them. She is in prison because she’s loved not wisely but too well.
Barbara Stanwyck, Double Indemnity (1944)
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She’s a much tougher, less feminine femme. The scene in which she is first encountered by Fred MacMurray’s insurance agent is a brilliant display of intelligence and guile.