adultery

Belle de Jour (1967)

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When writing about The Spiral Staircase, I mentioned that I was working on filling out some of the gaps in Douglas Brode’s Edge of Your Seat: The 100 Greatest Movie Thrillers. I have a few in the top twenty that I still hadn’t seen, so when deciding what to pick up at my local video store recently, I settled on Brode’s #17, Luis Buñuel’s 1967 film Belle de Jour. The title is a play on the French idiom “belle de nuit,” literally meaning beauty or lady of the night but colloquially meaning a prostitute. In Belle de Jour, Catherine Deneuve plays a woman whose repressed sexuality leads her to seeking employment with a madame, but only until 5:00pm each day, as she must get home before her husband returns from work. Hence, lady of the day. 

Séverine Serizy (Deneuve, fresh off of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) is seemingly happily married to handsome doctor Pierre (Jean Sorel), but her inability to be intimate with him belies a deviant, vivid sexual fantasy life. On their anniversary, the two go to a ski town, where they run into Séverine’s friend Renée (Macha Méril) and her boyfriend, an acquaintance of Pierre’s named Henri Husson (Michel Piccoli), whom Pierre has no real interest in befriending and whom Séverine despises because of his constant leering at her. While the two women are out shopping, Renée reveals that another friend of theirs has recently started working as a prostitute, and Séverine is surprised to learn that whorehouses are still in operation in such a modern era. Later, Henri reveals to her the location of one such place, and out of compulsion and curiosity, Séverine finds herself there, meeting Madame Anaïs (Geneviève Page), who offers her employment. Séverine is the blonde employed alongside a redhead and a brunette also working for Anaïs, and after some initial hesitation, finds herself in demand and successful, until she finds herself entangled with the criminal Marcel (Pierre Clémenti), who refuses to accept her work/life balance, to disastrous results. 

I was disappointed with this one initially. The truth of the matter is that this isn’t really a thriller, and when you expect that going in, you should be prepared to be disappointed. Most contemporary reviews cite the film as an erotic romance, and it’s not really that, either; it’s much more surreal, and defies traditional classification. It’s not very romantic, and I didn’t find it particularly erotic either, although I understand that it probably is for some people. If you’ve somehow come to Swampflix to find out if you’re going to see some areolas in this movie, I can tell you now that the answer is “No.” Séverine’s fantasies (and there is some argument to be made as to which scenes are fantasies and which really “happened”) are of a sadomasochistic nature, largely about being bound and whipped, but it’s quite tame to the sensibilities of a modern viewer. As the film opens, Séverine and Pierre enjoy a nice countryside carriage ride, until he complains about her frigidity and has the coachmen pull the carriage over and drag her into the nearby woods, where he ties Séverine’s hands above her head and has the coachmen whip her, then tells them to have their way with her before Séverine suddenly awakens from her daydream. 

As I went into this with the notion that this was going to be a thriller, I was pre-emptively wincing at the wounds I expected to see appear on Deneuve’s bare back as she was whipped, but none appeared. That would ruin the fantasy, both for Séverine and for the audience members who are experiencing this thrill vicariously through her. But it also reveals something about her psychology, that she’s not really interested in intimacy, just into being forced into doing something. When Renée first tells her about their mutual friend’s sex work, they both shudder at the idea of not having a choice in whom they sleep with; Renée saying “It can be unpleasant enough with a man that you like,” but the shudder that runs down Séverine’s spine is different. She’s interested in what it would be like to have no choice, at least in the abstract. When it comes time to actually perform services for clients, what she imagined and the reality of the situation come crashing together, and it’s much less pleasant, especially when Henri appears at the bordello one day and insists that she give herself to him. It’s much less fun than she had hoped, even if it does open her up to finally sleeping with her long-suffering husband. 

This is far too surreal a picture to easily slot itself into a genre category. There’s no real suspense at play for most of it, as Séverine merely wanders through one escapade after another, with it being unclear just how much of it is happening only in her mind. The film is bookended by the aforementioned appearance of countryside carriage riding, as the image repeats while Séverine hears the bells on the horses and looks out her window and seems to see the carriage approaching up a country lane, despite the fact that what lies outside is an urban Parisian street. At another point in the film, a man credited as “The Duke” arrives via the same carriage (including the same coachmen as in her earlier daydreaming) and invites her to come to his home for some “work.” This turns out to be dressing in a sheer black veil that covers her entire body and lying in a coffin, where he enters and addresses her as his dear departed daughter before descending out of frame and, one implies, masturbating. There are some reviews I’ve read of this that question the reality of this sequence, which I interpret to be purely fantasy based on the reappearing coachmen, but I suppose it’s up to the individual viewer. Each of the johns that she meets is screwed up in one way or another. The world-famous gynecologist known only as “the professor” has specific demands for a scene in which the “Marquisse” whips him. One client shows up with a box that he shows the contents of to one of the other girls, which she rejects for use in their bedplay (we never learn what it is, but after his session with Séverine, there is a little blood on one of the towels in the room). Marcel, of course, is the worst, the brutish thug of a much more civilized-seeming mobster, who has a lean and hungry look to him that’s attractive despite his unkempt hygiene. He even has several gold teeth as the result of a fight, which he bears at Séverine like the Bond villain Jaws at one point. 

That surreality is what makes the film interesting, to those of whom it may be of interest. We learn nothing of Séverine’s backstory or history, with all that is revealed of her happening in two separate flashes under five seconds, one of which shows her receiving communion as a child and the other of which shows her being kissed inappropriately by an adult man. There’s also something interesting happening in the way that Henri is infatuated with Séverine and even all but sends her to Madame Anaïs, but as soon as he learns that she’s working there, his interest dries up. It reminded me of something I read of John Berger’s years ago, about sexism of an older era in which a man would paint an image of a nude woman and then “put a mirror in her hand and [call] the painting ‘Vanity.’” Henri desires the observable woman, with her lack of sexual interest and apparent virginity, but as soon as she is like the women that he can attain, he has nothing but disdain for her, and he goes from one extreme to the other without ever getting even the tiniest glimpse into her internal life. 

When returning the DVD to the video store after watching it, both of the clerks volunteering that evening asked me how I had liked it, with one of them noting that he had rented it before and then simply run out of time to watch it, while the other was disappointed to learn that I hadn’t been thrilled with it. The truth was, it simply wasn’t what I was expecting. In many ways, it is the quintessential European art film that cinephiles are often mocked for enjoying. For me, I think that I’ll be digesting this one for a long time to come, but can reasonably say that it wasn’t for me, and it’s certainly not a thriller in any meaningful way.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Juliet of the Spirits (1965)

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The standout sequence in Juliet of the Spirits that dropped my jaw lowest in the theater was its ugliest & most mundane. The 2015 restoration of the 1960s Fellini classic is, for the most part, a gorgeous swirl of vibrant color. It’s a dark fantasy movie in which the Italian master invents the cinematic language for later texts as disparate & monumental as Lynch’s dream sequences, Jodorowsky’s circuses, and Friedkin’s exorcisms, all rendered in sinfully lurid Technicolor. That was all expected, though. What really caught me off guard is when Fellini pauses his gaudy reverie to also invent the cinematic language for the television program Cheaters. It happens in the sequence where his real-life wife & muse Giuletta Masina visits the private detective agency that’s been trailing her husband, and they play back to her a full week of documented adulterous behavior. The way the head dick in charge narrates the sepia-tone surveillance footage with time stamps and sneering innuendo is so specific to the Joey Greco era of Cheaters that I now understand that reality TV show to be a loving homage to the film’s legacy. Such is the power of Fellini.

Much like an episode of Cheaters, watching Juliet of the Spirits feels like intruding on a private domestic dispute that’s really none of our business. Our director is working through his real-life conflicts with his wife by illustrating his own adulterous behavior onscreen, through the avatar of actor Mario Pisu. Giuletta Masina stars as Giuletta Boldrini, a wealthy but lonely housewife who’s increasingly isolated by the extramarital indulgences of her husband Giorgio, played by Pisu. As Giorgio spends increasingly long stretches away with his latest fling, Giuletta seeks spiritual advice from the dark arts, meeting with a series of psychics & mystics in search of a calmer, wiser perspective on her broken marriage. This pursuit opens her mind to a loud circus of perverted spirits & ghosts that constantly parade through her head, pulling her out of her Catholic comfort zone towards a larger religious truth: pleasure is the true religion, and she should be cheating too. The whole thing plays like a plea from Fellini to his wife to start cheating on him to help balance things out and to take her mind off the marital injustice he initiated.

Unlearning Catholic guilt is easier said than done. The proto-Exorcist imagery results from a childhood memory in which Giuletta starred as a martyred saint in a church play, burned alive for the transgression of accepting Christ in her heart. Anytime the adult Giuletta considers indulging in an extramarital affair (with a handsome ghost, demon, or otherwise), her mind flashes back to this scarring memory, which has taught her to associate Earthly pleasure with guilt & pain. Everyone around her is fully enjoying what being alive has to offer—especially in the pleasures of the flesh—and yet Giuletta continues to fret, unable to let go and enjoy herself as much as her wandering husband. Buried somewhere in the film’s increasingly dreamlike imagery, there’s eventually a healing moment in which she frees her flaming inner child from her Catholic shackles and comforts her with a motherly embrace, but it’s still not enough to fully make up for what Giorgio has done to their marriage. Maybe Fellini’s admitting personal guilt there more than he’s attempting to shake his wife loose from her own self-limiting Catholic guilt. Again, it’s not really any of our business.

For all of its messy offscreen domestic drama and the deep psychological pain caused by religious repression, Juliet of the Spirits is often a light confection. Snazzy jazz scores the backyard wanderings of a mystic housecat and the Italo-fashion beachwear modeling of Giulietta’s fabulously amoral neighbor with no attempt to underline the dark-fantasy elements of the plot with any palpable menace. Fellini feels just as preoccupied with injecting eye-searing beauty into every frame of his first in-color picture as he is with working out his domestic issues with his wife. Even the candlesticks in the couple’s home are tinted lavender instead of the typical white, just to squeeze more color into the frame. It is, without question, the most gorgeous, surreal episode of Cheaters in the history of the show; and yes I am including the one where Joey Greco got stabbed on a boat.

-Brandon Ledet

Both Ways (1975)

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Long before New Queer Cinema directors like Derek Jarman, Todd Haynes, and Gregg Araki were praised for their confrontational depiction of queer sexuality onscreen in the 1990s, there was already a strong, decades-long independent filmmaking tradition of doing just that in hardcore gay pornography.  At least, that was the central thesis of Liz Purchell’s archival work in the Ask Any Buddy project, which is where I first heard of Jerry Douglas’s 1975 bisexual romance thriller Both Ways.  Although the review of Both Ways on the Ask Any Buddy podcast was less than glowing, it still felt like a necessary purchase when I ran across a used DVD copy of the film in a Minneapolis record store, since its X-rated onscreen sex meant I’d unlikely be able to access it on any mainstream streaming service in the near future (which is the exact kind of false scarcity logic that’s led me to collect a modest stack of vintage porno titles like Pink Narcissus, SexWorld, Bijou, and Fleshpot on 42nd Street).  On its surface, Both Ways is a fairly straightforward—pun unintended—porno drama about a closeted bisexual man living a double life, but between the director’s commentary track on the Vinegar Syndrome disc, the supplementary insight from the Ask Any Buddy pod, and the plot’s last-minute swerve into Hickcockian violence—okay, pun obviously intended that time—it ends up feeling like a surprisingly substantial work of outsider art.

The first sounds you hear in this Golden Age porno is a child giggling as his father tickles him on a carnival Ferris wheel.  Gerald Grant stars as a straight-laced family man: a Harvard graduate (which he’ll remind you of frequently) who’s built a tidy suburban life for himself as a high-powered lawyer and a loving father of a young son.  All is not well in the bedroom, though, as his sexually neglected wife, played by Andrea True (likely the most famous member of the cast, due to her disco hit “More More More”), confronts him for being distracted by a secret affair outside the house that she can’t quite figure out.  She’s correct, of course, as her husband has been sneaking around with—shocker of all shockers—a Yale student played by Dean Tait.  Now, you might expect that vintage pornography about a closeted bi man’s infidelity would mean double the variety of onscreen sex, but it really just doubles the amount of couples bickering.  This is the kind of porno-chic relic that speeds through rapid edits of sex scenes so it can really dig into its domestic melodrama, making for a shockingly sincere representation of male bisexuality for its era … until it takes a wild swerve into psychological thriller territory.  After all of its cheeky humor about collegiate rivalry between Harvard & Yale and all of its sentimental homelife drama in which the father figure constantly buys his cavity-sweet son handfuls of balloons, Both Ways gets really dark in its final twenty minutes, making for a chilling ending to something that’s ostensibly supposed to heat couples up on a naughty date night.

In filmmaking terms, Both Ways is surprisingly playful for a hardcore porno.  Douglas does a lot to mirror the domestic scenes in both of our antihero’s competing relationships, even going as far as to symmetrically pose his actors in front of wall-hung mirrors to drive the point home.  During early domestic squabbles where both couples recount how they first met and during a later pornographic montage of the cheating husband alternating between his two partners in two separate beds, the threesome’s body language is exactly copied in direct contrast to underline how little meaningful, physical difference there is between the two relationships.  Douglas also plays around with insert shots of artificial exteriors to simulate intimate dialogue when characters are navigating the world outside their bedrooms, shooting his actors against a surreal blue-void “sky”.  He also tries his best to ground this tale of extramarital romance within the context of Free Love looseness, setting a major couple’s spat at a swingers’ wife-swap orgy and meticulously framing a lit joint at the center of a male performer’s buttcheeks.  Other visual details & directorial choices are more inscrutable, such as the frequent cutaways to a frumpy housekeeper during the aforementioned wife-swap, the repetitive focus on yellowed copies of New York Times headlines to mark the timeline of the couples’ pasts, and the Ivy Leaguers’ obsession with ceramic beer steins – which only become more noticeably bizarre the more they become directly involved in the scene-to-scene plot.  It’s all baffling in its distraction from the presupposed purpose of hardcore pornography, but it also all adds to the feeling that this is a personal, thoughtful, creative project for Douglas instead of a quick cash grab between writing his off-Broadway stage plays.

I’m fond of Both Ways despite all of its lopsided plotting and its confused representation of Normal male bisexuality.  Even after the domestic melodrama gives way to crime-thriller psychology, the movie still has an oddly light tone to it, present both in the generic funk-guitar background music and in the nosy investigations of a local antiques dealer who mistakes the husband’s sneaking around for living a double life as an undercover Commie spy.  It may not be the artistic pinnacle of Golden Age pornography, but it does function as a clear, standalone example of how porn from that era has unique cultural value as independent filmmaking.  If nothing else, it’s difficult to imagine any mainstream Hollywood studio dramas of that time depicting male bisexuality with so much candor (even if it is easy to imagine a Hollywood version of this film choosing to conclude with the exact same act of domestic violence).  I got the sense that the reason the Ask Any Buddy crew were less enthused about Both Ways in their much better-informed review is that Jerry Douglas had previously contributed to a much more accomplished bisexual porno as the writer of Radley Metzger’s Score, which makes this one suffer by comparison.  I cannot personally speak to that comparison, as I have not yet scored a copy of Score while killing time in second-hand media stores on vacation, but I also never expected to find Both Ways through that method either, so never say never.

-Brandon Ledet

The Bigamist (1953)

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One of the ways Ida Lupino was able to make the leap from actress to director in the Old Hollywood system was by framing her work as morality tales. That way, she could get away with making the first woman-directed noir The Hitch-Hiker—a throat-hold thriller from start to end—by passing it off as a lesson on the dangers of adultery with just a few throwaway lines of dialogue. Her directorial follow-up to that chilling cult classic is much more enthusiastically committed to exploring adultery as a moralistic theme, as you can tell by its attention-grabbing title: The Bigamist. Oddly, though, The Bigamist takes a much more wishy-washy stance on the dangers of adultery than The Hitch-Hiker, even though it dwells on the act for the entirety of its runtime instead of merely evoking it in a mood-setting prologue. The Bigamist is a morality tale about adultery (through its furthest extreme in polygamy) without ever outright condemning the act as a sin. It’s an engagingly ambiguous film in terms of reading its moral compass even now—more than a half-century after its initial release—but especially so for its time.

Edmond O’Brien stars as a traveling salesman who is racked with guilt because he’s hopelessly in love with both of his wives, who live in two distant cities. Joan Fontaine co-stars as his wife of 8 years, who has settled into a business partner role as the initial romantic spark of their marriage has dulled. Ida Lupino rounds out the cast as the salesman’s wife of 8 months, a fiercely independent West Coast waitress who reignites the salesman’s lust for life. The movie is set up like a murder-mystery noir where the salesman’s discomfort around anyone digging into his personal life is meant to spark the imagination of the audience. What nefarious acts could he possibly be up to on these business trips? The answer, of course, is right there on the poster and in the title: “Edmond O’Brien is The Bigamist.” Once the full details of his double-marriage lifestyle are divulged, the movie mostly dwells on the melodrama of his predicament, focusing especially on the unbearable stress of balancing a double life. The women both get their own moments of spotlight to convey their internal anguish, but this is largely the bigamist’s story, and it’s in daring to sympathize with the lout where the movie finds its moral ambiguity.

In a lot of ways, The Bigamist feels like an inverse of (and a precursor to) Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur, in that it takes the husband’s love for both women seriously without poking too harshly at how the women might be working overtime domestically to make his traveling Lothario lifestyle possible. If anything, the film comes across as surprisingly pro-polyamory, since it entirely builds its melodrama on the guilt & harm of the salesman’s dishonesty rather than the usual fallacy that he can’t love both women equally at once. He initially cheats out of loneliness and confesses the transgression to his first wife in plain terms, who takes the admission as a playfully sarcastic joke since he’s just not the type to do such a thing. While most of his colleagues would just hire a sex worker to satisfy that urge, this lout can’t help but fall in love with his mistress, who initially asks that he reveal nothing about his personal life outside their relationship so as not to spoilt the mood. Both of his marriages are relatively functional in their own insular realms; what eats the bigamist up on the inside are the lies necessary to maintain his cross-country rouse. That’s a bold moralistic stance to take in a Hays Code era film where the leads have to sleep in separate beds for the sake of onscreen propriety.

Of the three leads, Ida Lupino is the most electric in her role as the salesman’s second wife. According to Wikipedia, this film has been cited as the first time the female star of a Hollywood film directed her own performance, which is pretty neat but also difficult to verify without several qualifiers. What’s much easier to verify is the strange real-life melodrama that played out behind the scenes between the director and her collaborators. Lupino had recently split with her ex-husband and creative partner Collier Young, who wrote & produced The Bigamist while at the start of a new marriage with Lupino’s co-star, Joan Fontaine. In that way, the film works just as well as a relic of Hollywood gossip as it does as a morally ambiguous noir. It even accentuates that Hollywood rumor mill DNA by setting the first scene of emotional infidelity on a bus tour of famous Los Angeles movie stars’ homes – including the homes of women like Barbara Stanwyck & Jane Wyman, who could have been cast in this just as easily as Fontaine (as well as the home of Miracle on 42nd Street‘s Edmund Gwenn, who does feature heavily in the movie as the nosy adoption agency bureaucrat who initially exposes the salesman’s bigamy). It’s a nice little meta touch for a movie so unavoidably steeped in Studio Era scandal.

Even speaking in general, Ida Lupino’s life & career are inextricably tied to Old Hollywood mystique. It’s incredible that she was able to manage as interesting & high-profile of a directorial career as she did in a system designed to lock women out of that creative process entirely. The Bigamist is not quite as immediately thrilling of example of her getting away with something within that misogynist paradigm as The Hitch-Hiker, but the longer you dwell in its moral ambiguity the more it feels like a one-of-a-kind anomaly. Like all of Lupino’s films (and even the filmmaker herself), it’s a wonder that The Bigamist was allowed to exist in its time at all.

-Brandon Ledet

Le Bonheur (1965)

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My earliest exposure to Agnès Varda’s work was as an intently unfussy documentarian. Her recent films Faces Places and (my personal favorite) The Gleaners & I are heavy on ideas and light on meticulous craft. Varda has a punk, D.I.Y. sensibility to her recent docs that embrace the affordability & portability of digital camcorders, freeing her from the struggles with financing that have cramped her entire career. It was jarring, then, to see a film from Varda’s past that deliberately recalls the overproduced artifice of Douglas Sirk’s Technicolor “women’s pictures.” The 2014 digital restoration of Varda’s 1965 melodrama Le Bonheur (supervised by the director herself) is a gorgeous, over-saturated indulgence in Spring & Summertime textures. The film is so rich with color that the screen is often filled with a single, opaque hue: red, green, blue, white, purple. Its idyllic Eden setting is a true immersion in Natural delights, a far cry from the sickly digital realms of Varda’s recent D.I.Y. docs. However, the political subversion & playfully abstract humor of her documentary work is still strongly represented just under that flower-carpeted surface. Le Bonheur is much closer to the Sirk-riffing bitterness of punk works like John Waters’s Polyester or Russ Meyer’s Good Morning . . . and Goodbye! than it is like Sirk’s studio lot work itself. She just happened to get there a decade before Meyer or Waters, delivering her own caustic subversion of the All That Heaven Allows era before that inspiration even had time to cool.

One of the most striking things about Le Bonheur is what it pretends to be: a judgement-free, matter-of-fact portrait of polyamory & extramarital romance. For most of the runtime, the film follows a chipper family man with the ideal wife-and-kids home life and just enough contract work as a carpenter to keep their world afloat. Without any malice or harm intended to a wife he dearly loves, he thoughtlessly slips into a sexual affair with a nearby postal worker whose childless, youthful life in the city excites him. As he describes it to his mistress, “My wife is like a hearty plant. You are like an animal set free. I love Nature.” For a while, Le Bonheur appears to agree with his naïve assertion that he can love both women equally to neither’s detriment. It initially presents itself as an idyllic French New Wave advertisement for the virtues of polyamory & the dissolution of traditional monogamous bonds of marriage. All that proto-Sexual Revolution moralizing is deliberately undone in the final fifteen-minute stretch. Seasons change. Lives are destroyed. The desire to maintain simultaneous relationships with a wife and a mistress under the blatant power imbalance of men’s freedom to skirt domestic responsibilities is exposed as an impulse of selfishness & entitlement. Is the wandering husband really so full of love that he can maintain simultaneous relationships with multiple lovers or is he merely a selfish, privileged lush who treats women as disposable, replaceable household appliances? Le Bonheur doesn’t decisively answer that question, but does allow it to hang bitterly in the air.

Although the surface details of Le Bonheur recall 1950s studio-made melodramas/”woman’s pictures,” Varda subverts that perception with experimental film editing techniques of the avant-garde. The washes of opaque color appear to mark subtle changes in relationship dynamics & mood over time, but with no concrete correlation that could be expressed in words. The pastel voids of interior domestic spaces recall the intense wall paper realms of the candy-coated musicals The Umbrellas of Cherbourg & Young Girls of Rochefort (both directed by Varda’s husband, Jacques Demy). Speaking of extratextual, real life romances, the married leads of Le Bonheur (Jean-Claude & Claire Drouot) were a real life couple as well, a kind of reality vs artifice tension that informs weirdo passion projects like A Woman Under the Influence or, more recently, mother!. Varda’s flair for expressionistic, art house filmmaking is most readily felt in her experiments in abrupt jump cuts. The film opens with an upsetting alternation between a symmetrical & an asymmetrical sunflower. A romantic tryst is depicted through quick shots of tangled, exposed flesh, confusing which details belong to which body. A dizzying dance scene is disoriented by partners swapped during a wedding celebration and telegraphsthe anxiety over the interchangeability of sex partners that later upends the plot. In its early honeymoon period, Le Bonheur resembles a Springtime Polaroid, a rigidly framed document of idyllic, Natural growth. Varda subtly disrupts, subverts, and rots that first impression as the film’s shifting romantic dynamics settle into a consistent groove, prepping her audience for the last-minute rug-pull that distorts any perceived advocacy for undisclosed polyamory.

Agnès Varda herself describes Le Bonheur as a “beautiful summer fruit with a worm inside.” That kind of social & political subversion lurking under the surface of what first appears to be a breezy delight seems to be consistent with the documentary work she’s buried herself in recent decades, which are way more fun to watch than their themes & subjects might suggest. What distinguishes Le Bonheur is how extreme of a delight its surface appears to be. The floral, color-soaked Eden where she stages her adultery-suspicious morality play is a Douglas Sirk-level indulgence miraculously achieved on a French New Wave scale & budget. Her protopunk subversion of that Sirk melodrama mindset is a little subtler than what you’ll find from Waters, Meyer, or Rainer Werner Fassbinder, so much so that it’s plausible to miss its criticism of men taking women for granted as domestic & emotional laborers entirely if you let your mind wander before the final minutes. The subtlety of that subversion is just as potent as the film’s flair for the avant-garde, though, an apple-gnawing worm that’s all the more effective for catching you off-guard in a sun-drenched Eden.

-Brandon Ledet

I Smile Back (2015)

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three star

Sarah Silverman is somewhat of a required taste as a comedian. Personally speaking, she’s one of my all-time favorites. Her Liam Lynch-directed stand-up special Jesus is Magic & her sadly defunct sitcom The Sarah Silverman Program are among my favorite examples of their respective mediums, but they have more of a small cult status than a widespread appeal. A small role on the television series Masters of Sex & the recent mental illness drama I Smile Back, however, have revealed that Silverman has a much more universal appeal as a dramatic actress. She’s downright Julianne Moore-esque in her ability to convey utter devastation through mere body language, an incredible talent considering how much of her career has been rooted in the other end of the entertainment spectrum.

In I Smile Back, Silverman plays a frustrated housewife suffering from anxiety, depression, and chemical dependency. Her mental illness inspires rash behavior she can barely control or keep under wraps – drug & alcohol abuse, adultery, inappropriate modes of masturbation, body image issues, and the impulse to duck her lithium prescription in favor of her self-medication routine. As she makes one self-destructive decision after another all you can do as an audience is cringe, silently shouting “No! Stop! Stop it!” with no control over her behavior. She reacts similarly, immediately regretting each transgression, but unable to stop herself in the act. Completely detached from her own sense of self, she confesses, “I need to remember how to be a good wife and a good mother and a good person,” but her disorder consistently interrupts any moves she makes to reconnect with her past healthy behavior. I Smile Back‘s broken protagonist loves her children – perhaps excessively – but the responsibility of that love is too much pressure for her to handle. She confesses, “It’s terrifying to love something so much.” This pressure leads to a quiet, seething hatred she can’t control and various self-destructive modes of releasing pressure.

I Smile Back is not a particularly unique film as far as mental health dramas go. Hell, Gabriel is a better example of the genre from just earlier this year. There are some flashes of brilliance on the filmmaking end, especially when the pacing & sound design attempt to match the protagonist’s inner anxiety. An opening montage’s frantic, scattered, rapid-fire edits recall a depressive, unsexed version of Russ Meyer‘s work. Shots of Silverman’s protagonist stumbling down the drug-warped nightmares of her own hallways are extremely effective in adopting her POV (as well as recalling the classic short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”). I also appreciated the way the film focuses on how men in her life dismiss the severity of her illness by pointing out how “crazy” & “crazy hot” she is or demanding to know “Why does everything have to be such a big deal?” For the most part, though, I Smile Back is a no frills portrait of a woman with a chemical imbalance & a history of family members suffering the same.

The real story here is how vulnerable Sarah Silverman makes herself for the camera. For the film’s press tour she has been very vocal about her own personal struggles with anxiety & depression & how they drove her connection with the film’s source material novel, a sentiment reflected in early scenes of the character/actress examining herself in a mirror. Her soul is laid bare here. I’m not sure that the quality of the film matches the intensity of her performance, but she was still fascinating to watch. I’m glad that an artist I respect chose to push her boundaries in a passion project like this & I hope the emotional weight of what had to be an exhausting experience doesn’t discourage her from taking chances like this again in the future. Silverman was phenomenal, even if the movie wasn’t nearly as special.

-Brandon Ledet

Vixen! (1968)

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EPSON MFP image

twohalfstar

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“Is she woman or animal? TOO MUCH for one man!”

While Russ Meyer was cranking out a string of vitriolic “soap operas” about couples on the verge of murdering each other – Common Law Cabin, Good Morning . . . and Goodbye!, and Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers! – his career was somewhat compromised by a sudden change in the cinematic landscape. Suddenly, in the freewheeling sexual revolution of the late 1960s, films bordering on hardcore pornography were beginning to play in somewhat respectable venues instead of underground porn theaters. In order to keep his career alive & relevant, Meyer had to adapt. It was difficult to sell a picture that teased, but never delivered onscreen sex if the public could get the goods elsewhere, so Meyer’s next couple of pictures– Vixen! & Cherry, Harry, and Raquel! – took a much harder turn to match the competition. Meyer’s first “hard sex” film, Vixen!, was the first American-made release to receive the “X” rating from censorship boards, an honor Meyer initially wore like a badge. Unfortunately, the director dulled down a lot of his more outlandish eccentricities, including his vitriolic dialogue & rapidfire montage edits in order to appeal to a larger audience, so the resulting film, however financially successful, plays a little dull after the darker, more bizarre territory of its direct predecessors.

As always with Meyer’s pictures, Vixen!‘s plot is razor thin. The titular hellcat, played by Erica Gavin, is an adulteress archetype we’ve seen before in Meyer films like Lorna & Good Morning . . . and Goodbye!, but while her cuckold husband may be shamed for paying more attention to his work than his wife’s sexual needs, Vixen herself suffers no consequences from her cheating ways. The lack of punishment with Vixen’s adultery isn’t necessarily a problem for the film. It’s kind of a cool idea that she’s a sexual healer who leaves a positively-changed trail of lovers behind her. First she seduces a visiting, married stranger. Then she seduces his wife (in Meyer’s first homosexual scene, which is very much against his film’s typical, no-frills, all-American sex). And then she seduces her own brother, who’s somewhat of a biker & a reprobate (in a depiction of incest that has got to be the closest thing to kink that Meyer had filmed outside the chest-shaving scene in Finders Keepers). Nothing of consequence comes of these encounters & they’re presented more or less for pure titillation. The problem with this formula is that instead of having hateful, knockdown arguments with her unsuspecting husband, Vixen directs her vitriol into racist attacks against a young draft-dodger named Niles. In her racist rants against Niles, Vixen drops words like “boy”, “watermelon”, “spade”, “chocolate drop”, and “Sambo” with hurtfully nasty abandon. For instance, when her brother asks her, “Is there anyone you wouldn’t make it with?” she replies “Only spades & cripples.” Fuck, that’s fucked. The thing is that Vixen is mostly portrayed as a positive character & the film’s concluding conflict involves an airplane hijacking that just skips right over the central couple’s adultery issues & just barely touches on the fact that the star of the show is a raging bigot, so then what’s the point of that character trait at all? At least when Meyer was depicting romantic monogamy as a hate-filled cesspool of bruised egos, I could tell what he was getting at, even if he was off-base. Here, I’m a little more confused & uneasy.

Still, it’s impossible to brush of Vixen!‘s significance as a Russ Meyer classic altogether. Meyer’s plan to make “hard sex” films (it’s not actually that “hard”, y’all; it’s barely even softcore porn) marketable to large audiences in Vixen! payed off nicely. The film cost very little to make, but made more than $7 million in its first year alone. As Meyer himself explains it, making a porn-leaning film palatable for couples instead of lone-masturbators “was the basis for Vixen!‘s huge success. Once you have that happen your gross doubles, even triples. It’s not just the raincoat brigade.” Unfortunately a lot of the old Meyer charm was lost in the translation as he reached for a more mainstream crowd, leaving the film with a distinct made-for-TV feel that would’ve left it to fit right in with the Skinemax market that followed decades later . . . if it weren’t for the not-sexy-at-all racist rants. Still, a great deal of Meyer’s weirdness shines through. If nothing else, Erica Gaven is a knockout as the titular Vixen. She’s more rabid animal than human sexpot & it’s great to see a woman take so much command of her own sex life in a skin flick from this era. It also helps that Gavin is a gorgeous actress with particularly striking eyebrows . . . and Meyer-approved breasts.

When she’s not screwing unsuspecting couple or ranting about the inferiority of other races, Vixen also is afforded some of Meyer’s strangest details to date, including a shot of her having sex framed from under a seemingly invisible bed as she bounces on the bare springs & an all-too-memorable scene in which she flirts by sticking a dead fish between her breasts & then mocking fellatio on its little, lifeless fish head. Even when Meyer was trying to tone himself down to appeal to larger audiences, he had a hard time concealing the fact that he was a total madman. This is also evident in a scene where Vixen is making love to her husband (for a change) that’s intercut with a separate pair of characters discussing the merits of Communism as a political system & in the lesbian seduction centerpiece where Meyer obsessively focuses on the image of boobs touching boobs as if he’s working out a new fetish for himself on camera (without bothering at all to discover how two women would actually have sex in the process). In a quicker paced, less-racist film with a true narrative conflict in any sense, these strange details could’ve amounted to something special, perhaps one of Meyer’s greatest films. As is, though, Vixen! is more important because it made Meyer a shit ton of money, money that afforded him more personal projects down the road. Some of his best work was just ahead of him.

-Brandon Ledet