The hot & heavy queer thriller Bound still feels ahead of its time, 30 years later - Queerty

Welcome back to our queer film retrospective,“A Gay Old Time.”In this week’s column, we’re revisiting the Wachowskis’ sapphic crime thriller, Bound, which marks its 30th anniversary this fall.

Last month, the groundbreaking lesbian thriller Bound, the directorial debut of the Wachowskis, turned thirty years old. To celebrate this milestone anniversary, this week we’ll revisit the iconic film that’s become a cult classic for generations of queer people—thanks in no small part to its stars’ career-best work—and how the film served as a launching pad for two filmmakers whose work would shape mainstream entertainment for the decades to come.

The Set-Up

Bound follows two women that meet in the same apartment complex, and the psychosexual love affair that develops from their literal first encounter when cross paths in an elevator.

Gina Gershon plays Corky, an openly lesbian ex-convict who’s hired to do painting and plumbing work on a building. There, she meets Jennifer Tilly’s Violet, a roughened housewife married to mobster Caesar (Joe Pantoliano) who immediately falls for Corky’s danger and allure. The two begin an intense flirtation that soon escalates to new heights of sexual and romantic passion.

Tired of Caesar’s abuse, the two come up with a plan to steal two million dollars from the mafia and run away together, which brings chaos, violence, and much-needed excitements into their lives and relationships.

The film is a stylish thriller that updates the narrative tropes and character archetypes of the noir genre by amping up the sex, violence, and gender roles in incredibly subversive ways. Although the plot is almost entirely contained inside a single building—often in either of the protagonist’s apartments—the filmmaking style and structure is incredibly sophisticated and inventive, using the camera, production design, and heightened performances to create an environment of tension throughout. In addition to classic noirs (like those made by John Huston and Billy Wilder in the Golden Age of Hollywood), the film evokes the style and tone of pulp literature, a genre known for freely diving into lesbian sexuality and imagery.

Dynamic Duo

Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly deliver two of the most defining performances of their careers as a pair of lovers carried by a tidal wave of passion that get caught in literal crossfire through their plan to escape together.

The roles of Corky and Violet were famously difficult to cast, mainly because of the explicitly lesbian themes and sexual tones. Violet was originally offered to Linda Hamilton, and Tilly first auditioned for the role of Corky. Once Hamilton fell through and Gina Gershon was floated as a name for Corky, Tilly agreed that the role was better suited for her and instead went on to play Violet.

These alternate realities are hard to imagine when one of the greatest strengths of the movie is not only the electric chemistry between the two actresses, but the way their personas informed the texture and layers of the characters.

Tilly—fresh off her first and only Oscar nomination for Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway just a year prior—uses her apparent naiveté and overt femininity to create a curious creature in Violet; someone bursting at the seams to become something more than the men around her make her out to be.

Gershon—who had just appeared in Showgirls, one of the most notable movies of that decade—saw Corky as a way to play a version of the sex vixen completely different from Cristal Connors. Corky is just as seductive, confident, and lethal as Cristal, but put through a whole different lens of gender expression and sexuality.

Before Entering The Matrix

Bound is not only a showcase of its leads’ versatility, but also of the filmmaking prowess of its two directors. A few years before they would explode into mainstream consciousness and leave a generational cultural imprint thanks to the Matrix movies (which radically transformed what big-budget filmmaking could look like), Lana & Lilly Wachowski’s feature debut displays a remarkably confident style and artistic voice from the jump.

Working with a shoestring budget, they proved that they were able to work within financial and operational limitations, turning what could have been a run-of-the-mill thriller into an artistic statement that showcased their ingenuity, visual flair, and ability to deftly explore thematic undertones like feminism, rebellion, and gender subversion.

And as with the rest of their work, it’s also even more complex and layered when examined through a trans lens. After each of their respective coming out journeys in the decades since, all of the Wachowskis’ movies can viewed as incredibly nuanced explorations on the trans experience. In a way, both Violet and Corky feel restrained and… well, bound to traditional gender roles and expectations.

Violet is expected to behave like a subdued housewife with her husband, and Corky has been pushed to the margins of society by patriarchal systems and judgments. They both embody different versions of femininity; one is the voluptuous hyper-feminine woman that resembles the femme fatales of the black-and-white noirs that inspired the Wachowskis; the other is a butch, yet still proudly female ex-con who feels more like a classical gangster than the actual gangsters in the movie.

The film brings these two extremes of the spectrum together as they break out of their norms into a relationship that exists in their own terms.

A Sapphic Sensation

Thirty years later, the film feels wildly ahead of its time. Its displays of unapologetic queer sexuality and desire are rarely seen even in movies these days, particularly in lesbian films, and its cultural significance has only grown within the queer community and film circles.

It’s a film that seems to have grown more layers the more the time has gone on. Its marriage of story, style, and themes have not only been rarely replicated, but not even attempted on movies at any scale today. Bound is a daring, subversive, and wildly entertaining film that shows so much can come out of two women glancing each other down in an elevator.

Bound is currently streaming on Kanopy, and is available or digital rental or purchase via Amazon Prime Video & Apple TV.

You can keep track of all LGBTQ+ films covered in our A Gay Old Time column via writer Jorge Molina’s handy Letterboxd List.