cinema

Her first name should have given the game away long ago, but for us laggards, Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle finally makes the writer/poet/celebrated wit's madcap problem plain: Dottie Parker was a self-loathing gay man trapped in a short woman's body.

Think about it - living for pleasure to bury the pain, oh the exquisite pain of being; looking for true love but settling for convenient sex; savouring experience yet unable to stop herself from transforming every feeling into a one-liner; searching for authenticity in a subculture (the Round Table - each member a card-carrying friend of Dorothy) that prizes performance and wordplay over messy emotion... Is it any wonder Jennifer Jason Leigh (right) comes across as a sad queer on a crying jag? No, it is not.

What is surprising is how explict the film makes its case, from Dorothy bitching at her second husband that he's "just a faggot" - takes one to know one dearie - to the inevitable willy jokes ("Dottie, why not try him? He's built like a horse." "Ever the optimist.") to the glimpsed typewritten message - "Dear God, let me write like a man" - to the inevitable appearance of a shrink, ready to pathologise our heroine's problems.

And it's what he has to say that really stamps DP as pre-Stonewall victim: Dorothy is mother-fixated and dramatises too much. Dorothy can't stay on one subject, but flits from topic to topic, denying seriousness and always coming back to herself. The doctor tells her she actually requires the "Op": a woman who needs a sex change to become the drag queen she so richly deserves to be.