The Opposite of Sex

‘The performance of the year in the film of the year’, is what Sight & Sound wrote about Cristina Ricci, seventeen during shooting, in her role as Deedee Pruitt in The Opposite of Sex. The directing début of Don Roos, who earlier wrote the screenplays for Single White Female and Boys on the Side, goes a lot further in examining the other side of love. All forms of affection take the rap in the devastating observations of the cynical teenage monster, a cross between Lolita and Dr. Strangelove. Roos, self-proclaimed gay, has Deedee the Terrible wipe the floor with politically-correct opinions. Both hypocritical Christian American morality and the victim role of gays striving for social acceptance are on the receiving end of this pitch-black comedy, full of deliberately tasteless jokes about piercings, the charms of minors and the urn of an AIDS victim.