Film

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993)

Director: Gus Van Sant

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

This adaptation of Tom Robbins' cult novel finally emerges as an embarrassing miscalculation. Thurman is Sissy Hankshaw, a model by profession and hitch-hiker by vocation. On a photo-shoot at a Dakota beauty ranch, Sissy is caught in the middle of a cowgirl sexual revolution against the feminine hygiene regimen of the Countess (Hurt). The film is a sour comedy and a curiously inert road movie. Mostly, though, it's a wacky allegory of the kind in vogue in the '70s, which is roughly when this sort of material might have had some sort of relevance. It's actually more like a time capsule: anyone nostalgic for woolly women's lib metaphors, feckless counter-culturalism, hippy-dippy rhetoric and bird symbolism, this is the trip you've been waiting for.

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