"Bad" Women and Brutal Men

By RICHARD CORLISS

Sarah walks into the bar, her eyes cruising for action. She downs a few drinks and lights up a joint. She shrugs off her jacket to reveal a low-cut T shirt. Till now the boys in the back room are just nursing their beers, thinking about nothing, or trying to. But they see her, and all the windows steam up. She is the star of her own show, and she loves it. The jukebox gets her dancing, sexy, like on a runway. Pleasin' and teasin'. Hey, college boy, dance with me, closer than sweat. Give me a long, deep kiss. Rev me up . . .

What happens next in The Accused is one of the longest, most harrowing rape scenes in Hollywood history, in which Sarah is spread-eagled on a Slam Dunk pinball machine and assaulted by three men. What happens throughout this good, fair film is the raising of many important questions about forcible sex. In the feminist age, can a woman display her sensuality as freely, even ( carelessly, as she does her intellect and ambition? If she does so, is she responsible for the prefeminist urges she triggers in men? Or is she just getting what she asked for, in a body language as old as the species? Can every man cop a plea of biological imperatives, of Stone Age lust, when he uses force as a tool of courtship? At what point does the love game turn into a war game, whose body count is one rape reported every six minutes in the U.S. and one rape in four involving multiple attackers? Finally, are those who watch a rape and do nothing guilty of abetting the crime? In today's battle of the sexes, can any bystander declare himself a pacifist?

In The Accused, screenwriter Tom Topor and director Jonathan Kaplan imagine a worst-case scenario that poses all of these questions and plays them out in a moral twilight zone where ambiguity gives way to atrocity. The movie boasts a daring, acute performance by Jodie Foster as Sarah, the coarse-mouthed waitress with the SXY SADI license plate, who can fist her face into a pugnacious sulk or vamp persuasively enough to steam your specs. In the process, The Accused has defied Hollywood odds to become an autumn hit, earning $18 million in its first 24 days of release. It has also stoked the hottest movie debate since Fatal Attraction encouraged married men to keep their mistresses away from the kitchen cutlery. Says Sherry Lansing, who with Stanley Jaffe produced both films: "We're hoping that no one seeing The Accused will ever again believe that rape is sexy or that any woman asks for it."

The movie begins just after the rape, as Sarah, her body bruised, her upper thighs scraped and bloody, bolts from the bar toward the nearest hospital. After more than an hour of legal and emotional skirmishing, in which a prosecutor (Kelly McGillis) decides to charge the men who stood by approvingly with criminal solicitation, the film climaxes with a depiction of the assault: Sarah's volcanic flirtation and the dreadful price she pays for it. "The film doesn't show bullets," says Foster, "just basic human cruelty -- what happens when people are in a room together. It's not inhuman, which is why it's so scary." By then, the moviegoer -- a witness-voyeur, just like the bystanders -- is ready to have his prejudices twisted from compassion to horror. "We wanted to lull the audience and then turn things around," Topor explains. "We were saying, 'As a spectator, you're part of the problem. What would you have done?' "

The film carries echoes of a generation of violence and apathy, from the Kitty Genovese case in 1964 to the New Bedford, Mass., rape in 1983. There is a political edge to the debate too. "During the Reagan years," says Kaplan, "there's been a 'blame the victim' mentality. We blame the poor for poverty. We blame the homeless for being in the street."

And some blame women for getting raped. Topor recalls that "the middle-aged mother of one of my friends saw the movie and said to me, 'Obviously she deserved it.' " Says Gail Abarbanel of the Rape Treatment Center at Santa Monica Hospital in California: "I haven't seen a single rape case with multiple assailants in which anyone has tried to stop it. And research indicates that the more people around, the less anyone takes responsibility."

No U.S. rape case has yet been prosecuted under a criminal-solicitation law. "A lawyer told me that a conviction such as the one in the film would probably be thrown out," says Topor. "But we were just raising it as one possible interpretation and using it to make a point. And the law says that anyone who encourages a crime is culpable. We all depend on each other to act when we get into trouble." And that applies to good Germans in the Nazi era or nice guys sitting in a bar. "If you and I abdicate," says Topor, "the bad guys win."

Sometimes the bad guys get put in the docket: the bad guy lurking in any man ready to act on his suspicion that an attractive woman is his for the taking. Sometimes the good guys, like the Accused team, win a small victory for women: women who should not ever have to decide, on pain of assault, whether they are good women or bad ones, victims or vamps.

With reporting by Elaine Dutka/Los Angeles