102 DALMATIANS

Gary Susman

Sure, sure, 102 Dalmatians (sequel to the hit live-action remake from 1996) is a solid-enough Disney kid flick, with its cute puppies, bland romance (Alice Evans and Horatio Hornblower's Ioan Gruffudd), hissable villainess (Glenn Close, reprising her role as Cruella De Vil), and brutal slapstick violence. But what's sure to go over tots' heads is all the gay subtext. For one thing, there's Gérard Depardieu as Jean Pierre Le Pelt, a designer of sexually ripe fashions who's clearly modeled after Jean-Paul Gaultier. (The scene where director Kevin Lima has Depardieu drinking out of a toilet is surely more humiliating than anything Bertrand Blier ever put him through.) For another, there's Cruella, played by Close with the diva-amp turned up to 11, and bedecked in costumes by Anthony Powell (who also clothed Close as another camp icon, Norma Desmond, in the musical Sunset Boulevard) that grow increasingly baroque throughout the film; she starts out looking like a walking sundae and ends up as a walking brioche. Finally, there's the whole subplot about aversion therapy, which evokes the procrustean attempts by quack psychologists to straighten out gays and lesbians. Here, the doctor (named Pavlov, of course) tries to cure animals of interspecies aggression and Cruella of her desire to turn Dalmatians into fur coats. But his post-hypnotic suggestions are undone by the ringing of that Freudian London landmark, Big Ben. Guess some folks just can't change their spots.