On Cinema

Consider the following plots and decide which is comedy and which is tragedy. (A) a man becomes obsessed with a beautiful Oriental opera-singer, unaware that she is a he. (B) A man forbidden access to his children makes himself over as a granny-figure so he can be housekeeper to his own progeny.

The latter is the comedy, as those who have seen Mrs Doubtfire will know, and the former is David Cronenberg's M Butterfly (with Jeremy Irons, right), a film bursting with missed comic opportunity if ever there was one. Mrs Doubtfire is a smash, M Butterfly is a flop, so perhaps Cronenberg should have played it for laughs. Certainly, current critical jabber about manhood-in-crisis in the Nineties obscures the blunt fact that Hollywood has a long history of farcical drag hits (Charley's Aunt, Some Like It Hot, Victor/Victoria, Tootsie) and that the upcoming crop of cross-dressing flicks don't much differ from their predecessors, being comedies of various hues. There's Johnny Depp looking back in angora in Ed Wood, Wesley Snipes slipping into something more comfortable for To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Love Julie Newmar and the Australian entry, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

Comedy, of course, tends to raise the anxiety level simply to defuse it: chaos is contained. M Butterfly, for all its faults, looks gender straight in the eyeliner, which could partially explain its failure. Cronenberg suggests that if femininity can be faked, then maybe masculinity is just an illusion too . . . Well, as Joe E Brown says in Some Like It Hot, nobody's perfect.

(Photograph omitted)