What I Would Risk for Love AND MoneyBound (1996)

Depending on the genre, some movies are more difficult to make than others. Comedies and horrors are the most difficult. But the viewer looks beyond the faults in these, because there are bad comedies and bad horrors all around. Expectations are low to begin with, so ultimately, it doesn’t matter.

Bound (1996) is a film, written and directed by the Wachowskis, the directors of the famed Matrix movies. True to the image one holds for them, even though this was their first film, it is different. Spanning multiple genres, from crime, thriller, neo noir and even comedy to some extent, It begins from a not very unusual setting and ends in a mess – in a good way.

Bound is a movie about a heist that with each progressing scene has the viewer hooked, gushing with adrenaline, awaiting keenly the next scene, guessing and trying to out-think the characters, sometimes cursing their shortsightedness, other times admiring their foresight.

The two main characters are Corky and Violet, two women who fall in love and decide to steal from the latter’s husband, who happens to be in the mafia. Bound is a low budget film which primarily relies on the skills of the actors and the limited change in setting that the studio could afford to tell a simple, yet engaging story.

Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly, who play Corky and Violet respectively, display an onscreen passion, with their words, with their sex, with their desperation for something more, and convert this passion to a plan that is ultimately the plot of this film. Their characters are vulnerable yet strong, limited in background, yet sufficiently well fleshed out.

Caesar, the husband, is played by Joe Pantoliano who you may recognise to be Teddy from Christopher Nolan’s “Memento”. He plays a very believable character, and does it the justice that it deserves. The manner in which he pulls off his character’s eccentricities, I might be stretching a bit here, reminded me of Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal. Joe plays a regular Mafia guy and skillfully turns him into a crazy, psychopathic character, with an Italian-American accent that is just right, lending a bit of hilarity to the otherwise heated scenes.

Women are not known to be treated very well in the Mafia. It is common to portray the men in the Mafia as sugar daddies for an attractive woman, whose only job is to pleasure the man who is paying her bills. This story of a woman who is married to a man in the Mafia, coupled with that of a very visibly lesbian woman, who in that time would have been looked down upon for just her appearance, is in addition to being the story of an entertaining heist, with its unexpected twists and gasp inducing turns,  a story of the persecuted coming together and rebelling against those in power, lest they forget that there still are those who do not fear them.