Butterfly kiss

Amanda Plummer is Eunice, a dangerously unstable young woman who is roaming the countryside for her girlfriend, Judith. While hitchhiking the motorways of northern England, passing through towns and cities scarred by decade-long recession and unemployment, she meets Miriam (Saskia Reeves), a shy introverted woman who finds in Eunice the first person who has ever taken her seriously. Told in flashback by Miriam as she is interrogated by the police, “Butterfly Kiss”, is a powerful and disturbing examination of the psychologies of two people left discarded by the economic and social policies of Thatcherite Britain. A huge chasm emerges between the love shared by the two women for each other and the hatred and bitterness they share against a social order which ignores their existence and their desires. Though Eunice is obviously psychologically ill, Michael Winterbottom refuses any easy psychological or moral conclusions. For an audience torn between the intimate generosity shared between the two women, and the bloody results of their murderous rampage, the film proves both emotionally moving and intellectually confronting.