"Butterfly Kiss's" lovers move to their own mad music By LAURA MILLER "Butterfly Kiss" Directed by Michael Winterbottom any resemblance between "Thelma and Louise" and Michael Winterbottom's "Butterfly Kiss" is purely circumstantial. They're both road movies about a pair of women, but if the Hollywood hit wanted to tell us about the outlaw aspect of female freedom, "Butterfly Kiss" is really about love and insanity -- which turn out to be the same thing. Eunice (Amanda Plummer), a demented vagabond who roves the freeways of England leaving a corpse or two in her wake, stumbles upon and off-handedly seduces a meek, drab gas-station clerk named Miriam (Saskia Reeves). Eunice carries a fistful of letters, and her quest for their mysterious author, Judith, is the nearest thing she has to a purpose. Miriam finds a center for her own listless life in her tempestuous companion, who douses herself in gasoline and strips to reveal a body tortured by chains, tattoos and piercings within the first few hours of their acquaintance. When Eunice vanishes, Miriam gives chase, abandoning her helpless grandma. Once she catches up with Eunice, Miriam countenances even the discovery of a half-naked dead man in the back of her idol's stolen truck, and helpfully buries the body in the woods. As Eunice, Plummer (best known to American audiences as Tim Roth's gun-toting "Honeybunny" in "Pulp Fiction") gets a rare chance to stretch, and she doesn't disappoint. Her performance is a cocktail of despair, charm, self-hatred, bitterness, religious ecstasy, coquetry and homicidal rage. She's genuinely frightening after the fashion of early Robert De Niro, with all the hair-trigger potential violence of the truly mad. "You knew where you stood with Eunice," Miriam explains in the black-and-white confessional sequences that punctuate the story, but nothing could be further from the truth. Eunice is an entirely unpredictable and dangerous enigma, capable of anything. "I'm a human bomb today," she chirps at one point. Reeves' Miriam counterbalances Plummer's volatility with a spaniel-like devotion. The contrast between her stolid normality and the outlandish proceedings sparks most of the comedy in "Butterfly Kiss," as when she cheerily pops out for some Cup o' Noodles while Eunice consummates a kinky tryst in their motel room. "I never stopped looking for the good in her," she reports placidly of her unfaithful and murderous lover. "You've got to look for the good in people, right?" Every now and then Reeves emits a glimmer of something devilish to indicate that Eunice has awakened a squelched aspect of Miriam: "The things Eunice did, everyone wants to do them. Everyone wants to pull the emergency cord on the train." Director Winterbottom and writer Frank Cottrell Boyce earn chutzpah points for setting their road movie in England; how far, after all, can these characters expect to go? The film has a grey, damp look befitting the locale and undermining the romanticism that clings to the iconic truck stops and highways of the American west. Miriam and Eunice aren't racing for the border, and despite their crime spree, no one's pursuing them. Instead they bounce aimlessly around the island, doubling back and re-encountering a man from Miriam's hometown. It's all claustrophobic and pointless. So is their relationship, a fitful connection that, regardless of their age, resembles the passionate friendships of the playground. Eunice's madness (mirrored by Trevor White in flashes of stuttered editing) traps her in a hellish childhood that's hinted at, if never described. "Punishment is the only thing I understand," she tells Miriam, echoing the shadowy authority-figure from her past who mangled her psyche. And, like a naughty kid, she's seeking the attention of her neglectful celestial parent: "God has forgotten me," she laments. "I kill people and nothing happens. You'd think he'd smite me." At any given moment Eunice might sweep the dazzled Miriam into her arms, order her around like a servant or abandon her. This is the stuff that fatal crushes are made of and Miriam can't resist, doesn't even try. The two engage in rudimentary conversations about their situation ("You try to make me good," says Eunice, "but I'll make you bad first"), but they're really guided by raw impulse. They get mixed up with a hitchhiking father and child, and then a lonely, philosophical truck driver, as the low hum of impending disaster grows ever louder. When Eunice turns out to be right about corrupting her companion, Miriam's innocence, strangely enough, still seems unsullied. The two of them -- locked in their primitive, sandbox dynamic -- are too unselfconscious to be rebels in the grand American style, too formless to be cool. That's the difference between "Butterfly Kiss" and an unregenerate piece of cheese like "Natural Born Killers" or a gender-politics bombthrower like "Thelma and Louise." It has no social agenda, which gives it its own bleak integrity. Like its heroines -- and lovers and madfolk the world over -- it's wholly occupied with chasing private demons and angels.

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