I KNOW WHAT I WANT
A film review by Ann Miller
Copyright 1993 Ann Miller
I saw this movie years ago but remember it still because of the disturbingly strange psychology of it. It is perhaps the most alien movie I have ever seen in English. It's like seeing a foreign film which somehow emerged from the western movie industry. For one thing, the character at the core of the movie does not think, act or look like any other female character I've seen before or since. Unlike the romantically yearning female characters I'm used to seeing, she is a startlingly a-sexual and hard-headed person. Not that she's ugly, a lesbian or a gold-digger! She's just determined to be logical about men and to remain impervious to the tug of passion. Perhaps that is why the movie rubbed me the wrong way. I'm accustoming to sharing the emotions of an open, genuine person at the heart of a film. I'm not accustomed to making the stretch to sympathize with a detached, inauthentic individual as the main character. I found the heroine hard to like and hard to relate to--but not evil. She is simply someone who doesn't know what she wants. This movie's title is sarcastic and tongue in cheek, for this woman is out of touch with herself. She is not merely fighting to suppress her feelings, like the Cher character in Moonstruck, she has succeeded in defeating her feelings entirely, to the point where she is totally unconscious of them.
It is important to avoid a sexual double standard in being overly critical of the female lead in I Know What I Want. Plenty of male characters lose touch with their feelings. A HEART IN WINTER (UN COUER EN HIVER) or WIDE SARGASSO SEA are recent films on that theme. Would the star of I Know What I Want seem so strange and wrong if she were a man? Fact is, in real life, many people of both sexes try to keep passion *in it's place*, somewhere under the thumb of practical logic. This movie just takes an unusual, ironic look at that effort.
I KNOW WHAT I WANT* is strange because of it's attitude--a salty Scottish bite, not overly sympathetic to any of the characters--dry and ironic. There are casualties who suffer from the heroine's inability to feel, but the movie is about her and not about the people around her who suffer because of her. In the end, as she discovers her true self, the writers expect us to rejoice in her rescue from an empty, soul-less life. This is a stretch for a modern audience. But if you can accept that there are a few women in the world who try to get the upper hand over their feelings, then this classic movie is an interesting experience.
Ann Miller aka a.h.
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