Final Analysis (1992)

(In French, On Cable TV, April 2022) Don’t be surprised to experience a strong and repeated sense of deja vu during the now-obscure Final Analysis, especially if you’ve already seen many 1990s erotic thrillers. Clearly in the same mould as Basic Instinct (released roughly at the same time, so not a copycat case), this thriller features a psychologist (Richard Gere) with poor impulse control when it comes to sleeping with patients, a disturbed woman who ends up being a femme fatale (Kim Basinger) and a younger woman (Uma Thurman) who may be sympathetic to one or the other. You may be thinking that you’ve already seen all of those elements before in slightly different combinations and you’d be right – watching Final Analysis is like rediscovering a forgotten film that somehow feels redundant. The plot is squarely in-line with the later series of erotic thrillers launched in the wake of the far-more-successful Basic Instinct – featuring things like a psychologist character too smart for his own good, yet easily manipulated. You can see the Hitchcockian influence, but also the way it anticipated a long string of prestige thrillers throughout the following decade. I didn’t hate it – even though it felt intensely predictable down to the personas of the actors involved, that very predictability also made it comforting to watch. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be that surprised to learn that the largely forgotten Final Analysis really came from a very similar parallel universe in which Hollywood history played out in slightly different yet similar ways.