drama

Air Conditioner (2020)

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I think of myself as someone who doesn’t need much story or overtly stated themes to fall in love with a movie. Cinema is such an immersive sensory experience that just the juxtaposition of powerful images & sounds should alone be enough to fully grab my attention, with narrative & thematic purpose falling to the side as secondary concerns. That personal resolve is routinely tested to its limits at film festivals, though, where I’m used to seeing exciting experiments with image & sound in movies that just . . . meander, never really arriving anywhere in particular. This challenge to my presumed comfort with a high-style/low-story imbalance apparently extends to the at-home, online film fests that have cropped up this summer thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, most notably the We Are One festival’s recent presentation of the film Air Conditioner.

Thematically, Air Conditioner is very up-front about what its central conflict is meant to represent. It even opens with dictionary definitions of “air”, “conditioning”, and “air conditioner” to sketch out allegorical battle lines between natural living conditions and an artificially controlled society. The simple household appliance of the air conditioner is positioned to represent some kind of unnatural, man-made distortion of how we’re supposed to naturally live as a community. Story-wise, there’s even a clear central protagonist deployed to give this vague metaphor practical in-the-moment meaning, especially in relation to societally constructed & enforced class divisions in Angola, Africa. We watch a quiet, calm handyman travel between small jobs & customers in the middle of an air-conditioner related phenomenon in his city, while endless grids of window-unit ACs hanging above him out of every apartment window. He mostly keeps his thoughts to himself, so you have to infer his reaction to the sights & sounds of the bizarre air conditioner crisis yourself. Mostly it just seems like he’s trying to minimize being hassled while the world around him is falling apart, which is at least a universally relatable impulse.

The hassle of the day in this instance is a big one. All air conditioners in the city are malfunctioning and falling from their windowsill perches to the ground, threatening the lives of pedestrians below and drastically raising the temperature of the rooms they’re meant to cool. The closer you live to the Equator the more that premise will sound like a horror film to you, as even just in New Orleans I can tell you that a summer without an air conditioner is miserable (if not borderline life-threatening). While this premise could have easily been molded around a sentient killer-objects horror genre the way of Rubber, The Lift, or Death Bed: The Bed that Eats, however, Air Conditioner takes a much more esoteric route. Our handyman takes a customer’s fallen air conditioner to a repair shop, where a mad scientist converts it into bizarre machinery that projects working-class people’s memories onto video screens and conjures their visions of the future. Elsewhere, working-class men converse through telepathy in the alleys between the buildings the ACs are falling from. A sparse, jazzy score punctuates the handyman’s travels between these mysterious figures and his far less interesting bosses above. It’s all very loose, observational, and aesthetically pretty.

The opening credits of Air Conditioner include a montage of still photographs, including one where a subject is wearing a dress that declares “Art is resistance.” Maybe the point of the movie was not to say anything particular about class disparity in Angola, nor to stage a narratively satisfying story around that theme, but to simply point out that it exists. Maybe illustrating class disparity through something as ubiquitous as air conditioners was the intended resistance. If that’s the case, the film might have fared better as a short than a feature, as the themes & narrative were so loosely defined that all I could really focus on was how eerie the score could be in its better moments and how well the film functions as fine-art portraiture of Angolan locals. I’d usually like to think that kind of pure sensory immersion is enough to fully leave me satisfied, but it ended up testing my patience by the time it fully settled into its groove. There’s something alluring about the idea of common household appliances rebelling against their duty and inciting a class system rift through abandonment of their post, so much so that I wish that this particular movie had taken a more straight-forward path in exploring that idea. I’m a little ashamed to admit it, but I wish it were a little more grounded & basic.

-Brandon Ledet

Inserts (1975)

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When the New Hollywood movement made movies dangerous & vulgar again in the 1970s, there was a kind of nostalgia in the air for pre-Code filmmaking of the 1920s & 30s. It’s the same way that punk dialed the clock back from mid-70s stadium rock to straight-forward 60s garage. Counterculture touchstones of the era like The Cockettes, Cabaret, and Kenneth Anger’s Magick Lantern Cycle all pulled influence from an idealized vision of Old Hollywood hedonism in the industry’s pre-Code era. The forgotten X-rated drama Inserts is no exception to this indulgence in pre-Code nostalgia, but it takes a more direct, literal approach to mourning the loss of the Hollywood that could have been if it weren’t for the moralistic censorship of The Hays Code and it’s fiercest enforcer, Joseph Breen. While most 1970s artists were romanticizing the first couple decades of amoral Hollywood excess at its heights, Inserts instead visits the era at its death bed to have one final swig of liquor with its corpse before it’s hauled off to the morgue. It’s more of a grim memorial than a celebration, which likely contributed to the film being forgotten by critics & audiences over time.

A pre-Jaws Richard Dreyfuss stars opposite a pre-Suspiria Jessica Harper as a 1930s director/actress duo scrounging at the outskirts of the Old Hollywood system. Dreyfuss is the lead: a once reputable Silent Film director who floundered when the industry shifted into making Talkies. Bitter about his fall from fame and, subsequently, blind-drunk, he wastes his directorial talents by shooting stag pornos in his decrepit Los Angeles mansion. Harper enters his life as a wannabe actress who volunteers to shoot anonymous “inserts” for an incomplete porno that goes off the rails when its original star overdoses on heroin. In exchange, she pushes Dreyfuss to return to his former glory as a fully engaged, passionate filmmaker and to teach her the ropes of her desired profession as a Hollywood starlet. Their miserable struggle to complete the picture is sequenced as if in real-time, while other doomed characters drift in and out of the shoot (most significantly Bob Hoskins as a blustering porno financier and Veronica Cartright as a more, um, experienced performer). The whole thing feels like a well-written & performed but incurably misanthropic one-act stage play.

While Inserts is effectively about the death of Hollywood’s hedonistic first wave, visions of that fallen empire are mostly left to play in your imagination off-screen. Names like Strondheim, DeMille, and Gish are shamelessly dropped in non-sequitur anecdotes. Meanwhile, the much-buzzed-about new kid in town Clark Gable periodically knocks on the door of the mansion the movie rots in, but he’s never invited inside. Hollywood is changing outside, but it’s not deliberately leaving Dreyfuss’s drunken misanthrope behind; that’s a decision he’s made himself. We’re mostly left to rot with him in the choices he’s made: his choice of cheap booze, his choice of self-destructive associates, his choice of violent, vulgar “art.” The core of the film’s overwhelming sense of boozy, sweaty desperation is in his budding relationship with his newest starlet, Harper. The volatile pair turn shooting inserts for a throwaway stag porno into a game of dominance & mutual self-destruction. It’s a sick S&M game where he tries to scare her away from the industry by referring to her naked flesh as “meat” and acting as the domineering auteur. In turn, she playfully tops him from the bottom – mocking the sexual & creative impotence caused by his alcoholism in a humiliating display. Their collaboration is the act of filmmaking at its ugliest and most corrosive, an extreme exaggeration of the industry’s worst tendencies.

Inserts isn’t all smut & gloom. The film is viciously miserable, but it’s also shockingly amusing when it wants to be. It’s darkly funny the way a lot of stage plays are, often interrupting its cruelest offenses with a withering quip or a burst of slapstick humor. It constantly tempers its 1920s filmmaking nostalgia with Hollywood Babylon-style shock value in heroin addiction, necrophilia, and casting-couch abuses. Still, that nostalgia manages to shine through the grime, and the film mostly feels like a belated funeral for a well-loved era that was cut short by Breen & Hays. It might not be as fun to watch as a Richard Dreyfuss porno-drama sounds on paper, but it’s a rattling, captivating experience that deserves to be dusted off & re-evaluated now that we’ve all had enough time & distance to properly sober up.

-Brandon Ledet

Dogs Don’t Wear Pants (2020)

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The recent Finnish drama Dogs Don’t Wear Pants shamefully stumbles into some major Kink Movie clichés that I would love to see abolished entirely. This is a movie about an icy dominatrix who—surprise—allows her heart to melt for the first client who shows her romantic tenderness. That client is a father who—shocker—cannot fulfill his familial responsibilities because of his all-encompassing obsession with kinky sex. Other well-worn clichés about pre-scene negotiation and non-simulated violence also apply. And yet, I still very much adore this film, if not only because it follows what might be my all-time favorite plot template: Our protagonist is obsessed with something they know is going to eventually kill them but they keep returning to it anyway because it makes them super horny.

A widower processes the grief of not being able to save his wife from drowning by hiring a dominatrix to help him explore an emerging kink for breath play. As a respected brain surgeon, he logically knows just how dangerously irresponsible it is to have your air supply cut off by choking, even if through consenting to erotic asphyxiation. However, once he accidentally stumbles into a dominatrix’s play dungeon and experiences his first euphoric blackout by choking on her whip, he can’t help himself. The man spirals out from low-key depressed widower to depraved stalker who won’t let women be until they literally choke the life out of him so he can re-experience his near-death euphoria. The problem is that the dominatrix (besides not wanting to participate in his death wish) grows an unexpected soft spot for the doomed soul and can’t safely give him what he wants in a controlled environment. Breath play is already a dangerous enough risk under the best circumstances; his obsession with the most extreme end of that risk is absolutely terrifying to anyone unfortunate enough to be pulled into his self-destructive orbit.

As kink-misinformed as Dogs Don’t Wear Pants can be in terms of its fictional clichés, it at least takes genuine erotic delight in its femdom dungeon sessions. Giallo-esque red gel lights reflect off the dominatrix’s patent leather catsuits with an eye-searing intensity as she issues commands to her latest, most troubled client as if he were a lowly dog (thus the title). The actual kink sessions are long, lingering, and genuinely erotic. While the breath play itself is essentially assisted suicide, the way the widower masturbates to his wife’s left-behind perfume & wardrobe within and outside the sessions registers as genuine fetishism. The movie even has a positive outlook on kink as a therapeutic tool once he experiences a personal breakthrough that shakes him out of his rut (even if he takes a long, dark road to get there). Personally, I would have loved to see that breakthrough occur in the second or third act so we could experience the peculiar romance that develops once the film pushes past its genre’s most often repeated clichés. But, hey, maybe I’ll get my wish and this indie Euro fetish drama will somehow land a sequel. It ends at its most interesting point, and I would love to see that trajectory pushed even further.

I assume that if you leave a movie wanting more, it must qualify as some sort of a success. I may be frustrated by the way Dogs Don’t Wear Pants repeats the worst sins of the kinky erotic thriller genre, but it’s more than peculiar & stylish enough to be forgiven for the transgression. Or maybe I’m just too much of a sucker for neon lights & form-fitting leather to get hung up on its faults.

-Brandon Ledet

Ticket of No Return (1979)

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When we recently discussed Jacques Tati’s PlayTime as a Movie of the Month selection, we fixated on the film’s iconic restaurant sequence, in which its sterile, icy façade is gradually broken down into a sweaty mess of drunken revelry. It was a pleasure, then, to discover a sloppy-drunk lesbian remix of PlayTime in Ulrike Ottinger’s Ticket of No Return that seemingly adapts that one restaurant sequence into a feature-length narrative. Self-described as a “portrait of a drunkard”, Ticket of No Return follows an unnamed, mostly silent, seemingly wealthy woman as she deliberately drinks herself into oblivion in Berlin. She’s not as befuddled or as passive as Tati’s signature Monsieur Hulot character. Rather, she’s a self-destructive lush who stumbles through Berlin as a silently obnoxious tourist, determined to guzzle down cognac & cocktails by the gallon on every barstool in the city. The film also chooses an entirely different political target than Tati’s screed against the nearing homogenized monoculture of a tech-obsessed future, focusing instead on the ways in which publicly misbehaving women are socially treated as repulsive beasts, while men are afforded much more leeway in their own libertinism. Still, Ottinger extrapolates a lot of her narrative’s sweatiest, most debaucherous impulses from the drunken restaurant breakdown sequence in PlayTime, converting the best scene from a well-loved movie into its own self-contained world of degeneracy & despair.

One of the more curious dynamics of Ticket of No Return is the film’s balance between subtlety & on-the-nose political commentary. Ottinger directly inserts her own voice into the picture as a narrator in the opening scene, a lengthy introduction to the unnamed protagonist’s sole function as a self-destructive alcoholic. Without that preface, it might have taken a while for her behavior to seem out of the ordinary, as excessive alcohol consumption is so socially encouraged that it doesn’t initially register as being especially unhealthy. Ottinger even deploys a literal Greek chorus to state as much in-dialogue, casting three characters as Social Question, Common Sense, and Accurate Statistics – morally uptight women who only speak in plain facts relating to their absurdist namesakes. However, even with all this blatant commentary on our gendered societal relationship with alcoholism, the film somehow comes across as a cryptic, esoteric art piece that cannot be fully understood, at least not on a first watch. As our “sightseeing” boozer protagonist becomes increasingly plastered in her dizzied tour of Berlin, the film exponentially obscures its messaging & intent in an absurdist fashion. It’s simultaneously an on-the-surface political statement that discusses its gender theory & alcoholism themes in plain academic terms and an enigmatic gaze into a drunken abyss that’s just as mysterious as it is playfully meaningless. It’s a fascinating internal conflict that will likely confound & alienate some audiences just as much as it delights the cheeky art school lushes who find themselves on its wavelength.

There’s a listless repetition to Ticket of No Return that will test a lot of audiences’ patience. After the narrator announces that our unnamed protagonist has purchased a one-way ticket to Berlin with Leaving Las Vegas-style intent, there’s not much that changes from scene to scene. She simply stumbles from bar to bar, drinking gallons of booze and swatting away sexual advances from both men & women while reaching for bottles. Often, the biggest excitement in the film is what outrageous outfit she will wear next, as her high-couture wardrobe harshly clashes against the degenerate behavior of her drinking escapades. The movie can be very unaccommodating if you’re not onboard with the most exciting action onscreen being how an asymmetrical primary-color dress is accessorized with dramatic sunglasses, in which case this movie is very much not for you. After it settles into its boozy groove, all that’s left onscreen is a woman engaging in self-destructive behavior while modeling obnoxious, over-the-top fashion pieces. If you’re looking for more grandly staged commotion, Tati’s PlayTime is better suited to dazzle you in its extravagance. Personally, I was much more attracted to this drunken, feminist, low-stakes/high-fashion tale of a bumbling tourist in a strange, overwhelming city. I even found it to be the funnier film of the pair, in its own nihilistic way.

-Brandon Ledet

Electric Swan (2020)

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One of the more uniquely impressive strengths of cinema as an artform is its ability to mimic the loopy, transcendent quality of dreams like no other medium. My favorite films tend to be the most highly-stylized, shamelessly artificial indulgences in cinematic fantasy, the ones that disregard the limitations of real-world logic to instead achieve something distinctly subliminal & surreal. The 40-minute mini-feature Electric Swan taps into that subliminal dream space with an impressive sense of ease. It’s a quiet, low-key drift through a retro-futurist dystopia that’s just as mesmerizing & frustratingly unresolved as any nightmare you’ve had during a mid-afternoon nap. It doesn’t have anything especially novel or pointed to say about the class disparity conflicts that give shape to its story, but the hypnotic, dissociative filter it processes those themes through help them to upset & resonate in a way only a movie or a nightmare could allow.

Almost the entirety of Electric Swan is confined to a retro-futurist apartment building in Buenos Aires. Like in a lot of dystopian sci-fi, the wealthiest residents live on the top floor of the building, with levels of class descending with the floor levels all the way to the basement – where the building’s Indigenous, impoverished security guard lives alone. We mostly watch the guard make his daily rounds, acting as a doorman, handyman, therapist, and babysitter at the beck and call of the building’s residents. Both the wealthy and the working class children he serves describe their dreams to him while he struggles to keep up with his daily duties without assistance. Meanwhile, the building itself takes on a menacing presence, as if it were literally haunted by the class divisions it upholds. The wealthy on the top floors become mysteriously nauseous with motion sickness as the building sways; the security guard’s humble basement dwelling floods from an unknown water source; and everyone in-between acts as if the world’s about to end at any minute. Then, same as if in a dream, their shared reality abruptly shifts entirely in a way that cannot be explained by logic or by narrative tradition.

Electric Swan might only get away with its subliminal loopiness because it’s so firmly tethered to familiar genre tropes. The whole thing plays as if someone explained the plot of High-Rise to you as a bedtime fairy tale and then you scrambled all the details in a half-remembered dream. The ease in which it distorts its matter-of-fact portrait of class disparity through a surrealist dream lens is only really paralleled in recent post-Buñuel oddities from South America like Zama, Icaros: A Vision, and Good Manners. Its style vs. substance balance is more befitting of a music video than a feature film, which is likely to agitate anyone who looks to movies for “a good story” rather than a transcendent sensory experience. If you’re typically drawn to movies that play like dreams or to the eerie space where dystopian sci-fi meets fairy tale fantasy, this is one of the most vivid class allegories you’re likely to find this year. And even if you don’t fall under its spell, it’s too short to truly waste your time.

-Brandon Ledet

Pride (2014)

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Sometimes political action looks like putting a brick through a window or spitting in the face of abusive cops who could (gladly) do much worse to you in return. We’re currently living through such urgent times, where the public execution of George Floyd has incited mass #BlackLivesMatter protests around the globe, which have been needlessly escalated by police. This is coincidentally happening at the start of Pride month, when political protest annually takes the form of parades & parties, a celebration of communities whose mere existence is in opposition to oppressors who’d rather see them dead. Both of these grandly conspicuous forms of political action are valid – vital, even. That’s a point that’s worth remembering in a time when major media outlets & self-appointed pundits at home will actively attempt to discredit them for demonstrating in “the wrong way.”

The 2014 film Pride opens with depictions of similarly conspicuous political action: a mass of ruthless bobbies beating down a crowd of working-class joe-schmoes for daring to stand up for themselves during the 1980s U.K. miners’ strike, followed by a dramatic recreation of a 1980s London Pride march. To its credit, though, the film doesn’t fully glamorize political organization & protest as romantic, action-packed heroism for the majority of its runtime. It instead paints an honest picture of what the bulk of political action looks like on a daily, boots-on-the-ground basis: it’s tedious, thankless, and mostly uneventful. Pride is realistic about how unglamorous the daily mechanisms of year-round protest are. It focuses more on the distribution of pamphlets, the repetitive collection of small donations, and the under-the-breath verbal mockery from passersby that make up the majority of political organization, rather than extraordinary moments like now, where more drastic actions are necessary. And it manages to make these well-intentioned but mundane routines feel just as radical & punk-as-fuck as smashing in a cop car window. It proudly blares Pete Seger’s union organizing anthem “Solidarity Forever” in the background as a rousing call to arms for a life decorated with chump-change collection buckets & hand-out leaflets that are immediately tossed to the ground.

Where Pride is incredibly honest about how mundane most political organization is, it’s shamelessly artificial & schmaltzy about the messy lives & passions of the human beings behind those collective actions. This is a feel-good historical drama about gay & lesbian activists in 1980s London who stuck out their necks to show solidarity with striking coal miners in Wales, modeled after the real-life organizational efforts of the Gays and Lesbians Support the Miners alliance. It’s basically an improved revision of Kinky Boots that genuinely strives for authentic, meaningful political observations about the overlapping struggles of queer urban youths and the working-class townies who are socialized to bully them instead of recognizing them as comrades. The only hiccup is that it’s ultimately just as safe (and weirdly sexless) as feel-good queer stories like Kinky Boots that erase the personal quirks & humanistic faults of its gay characters to smooth them out into inspiring, inhuman archetypes. There is no sex, nor sweat, nor unhinged fury in this film – just politics. And it remarkably gets just by fine on those politics alone because it actually has something to say about class solidarity & grassroots political organization, especially in the face of stubborn institutions who’d rather die than acknowledge your comradery.

Part of what makes this vision of community organization in sexless, tedious action somehow riveting is the collective charms of its cast, which is brimming with recognizable Brits. Dominic West is the closest the film comes to allowing a character to fully run wild, as an elder statesman of his queer political circle who’s prone to partying himself into a mad state of debauchery. Bill Nighy is his polar opposite, playing a bookishly reserved small-towner who’s so shaken up by the political yoots who invade his union hall that he comes just short of stammering “Wh-wh-what’s all this gaiety then?” Andrew “Hot Priest” Scott carries the cross as the film’s Gay Misery cipher—suffering small-town PTSD in the return to his childhood stomping grounds in Wales—but he gives such an excellent performance in the role that it somehow lands with genuine emotional impact. A baby-faced George MacKay is deployed as the bland, fictional, fresh-out-of-the-closet protagonist who makes gay culture feel safe & unalienating to outsiders who might be turned off by someone less “accessible”, but he somehow manages to mostly stay out of the way. We check in to watch him gay-up his record collection with Human League LPs and experience his first (and the film’s only) same-gender makeout at a Bronski Beat concert, but he’s mostly relegated to the background. The film’s class solidarity politics are always allowed to stand front & center as the main attraction, and the cast is only there to be charming enough to make standing on the sidewalk with a small-donations bucket seem like a cool & worthwhile way to spend your youth, for the betterment of your comrades.

A lot of Pride‘s historical setting dissociates its political messaging from our current moment. George Floyd-inspired protests aside, gay pride marches meant something completely different at the height of 1980s AIDS-epidemic homophobia than they do now, and Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative tyranny has since become more of a political symbol than an active threat. The mundane day-to-day mechanics of community organization have largely remained the same over the decades, however, so the film chose a fairly sturdy basket to store all its eggs in. It’s difficult to make the daily routines of political organization seem sexy & cool, because the truth of it is so draining & unglamorous (until it’s time to throw a brick). Pride doesn’t bother with the sexy part, but it’s got plenty of energizing, inspiring cool to spare, which is at the very least a more useful achievement than what you’ll find in most feel-good gay dramas of its ilk.

-Brandon Ledet

Selah and the Spades (2020)

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I very much wanted to adore this film, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it never wanted to be a film in the first place. Selah and the Spades opens with a massive exposition dump detailing the kinds of intricate structural hierarchies & historical power struggles that are referenced at the front of multi-volume sci-fi & fantasy novels with corresponding maps of fictional fantasycapes. Except, it’s a very simple high school teen drama about boarding school drug trade. The movie extends the cafeteria-set introductions of various high school cliques that are normally banged out in less than a minute in films like Heathers or Mean Girls into a feature-length tome about warring “factions” and stolen “ledgers.” It’s far less invested in the inner lives of individual characters than it is in the generational passing of the torch from graduating seniors (who care more about maintaining these hierarchies than they do about moving on to college) to their underlings. The movie is so wrapped up in establishing the rules & parameters of its boarding school drug trade markets that it leaves almost no time to establish a reason for the audience to care. It plays more like a backdoor pilot for a tie-in, Degrassi-style TV series than a proper standalone feature film, establishing the rules & boundaries of its universe up front and waiting to flesh out its characters in future episodes.

The titular Selah is a popular honor student at an elite boarding school, overwhelmed both by her parents’ pressure that she academically overachieve and by her responsibilities as the figurehead of her school’s most prestigious drug-trade “faction,” known as the Spades. This premiere season of Selah and the Spades details Selah’s search for a worthy protegee to take over the reins of the Spades’ schoolwide drug ring once she graduates. Meanwhile, other jealous factions—the Bobbies, the Skins, the so-and-so’s—pressure Selah and the Spades to cede their power over the school entirely. The season finale is set at senior prom, of course, and it ends on a cliffhanger guaranteed to have you coming back for the next batch of episodes as soon as they air. I feel as if I’ve put in the work that most long-form “prestige television” dramas require before they “get good” several hours into their runtime, after all the main characters have been sketched out and the battle lines are drawn. Except, I don’t know that I’ll be sticking with this particular high school drug trade series the way I did with HBO’s Euphoria, which was much more interested in the detailed character work, morbid gallows humor, and sensationalist hedonism necessary to make this kind of prerequisite homework feel worthwhile.

Selah and the Spades looks great. This is especially evident in the couple isolated scenes where Selah directly addresses the camera during cheer squad practice, an army of uniformed cheerleader lackeys backing her up as she explains the transgressive pleasure of power in a teen girl’s life. Those isolated moments recall the transcendent cinematic achievements of coming-of-age works like Skate Kitchen & The Fits, but for the most part Selah and the Spades doesn’t feel like cinema at all. It’s pretty, but it’s largely devoid of humor, poetry, atmosphere, or a recognizable sense of danger or transgression. All that’s left is an intricately mapped-out hierarchy of warring high school cliques that I can’t imagine any audience truly caring about unless they are young enough to look up to the characters onscreen as the Cool Kids they hope to meet once they get to high school. Considering how artificial & fantastic this setting can feel, that potential audience might just have to settle for getting to know these kids better when Selah and the Spades gets picked up as the ongoing television or YA novel series it desperately wants to become. Even though I didn’t enjoy the film very much, I do hope that transition into a new medium eventually takes place. It would be a waste of these 100 minutes of self-serious table setting for the show not to be picked up after its pilot episode.

-Brandon Ledet

The Story of O (1975)

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For the first half of the 2010s we lived on a street that was absolutely perfect for yard sales. Our version of Spring Cleaning was always kicked off by a seasonal yard sale to get as much accumulated junk out of the house as possible (a tradition that has since been supplanted by the hassle of hauling our excess bullshit to thrift stores & second-hand shops), and they were always a success. They were such a success, in fact, that friends & family would dump their junk on us to help distribute it into the ether (for a very minor payout). This ritual frequently involved my sister handing off giant Rubbermaid bins overflowing with DVDs she was eager to get rid of as streaming movies online became more of her standard entertainment routine over that half-decade. The shameless movie nerd that I am, I’d always pick through those bins myself before offering them up to the vulturous public and pull out a few titles here or there to store up in my own house, where they’d also go unwatched. My sister’s cinematic castoffs were usually recognizable mainstream movies (often good ones), but there were always one or two deeply strange outliers in there if I was committed enough to search for them. I don’t remember many specific examples, but I do remember this: No film was ever as strange to find in my sister’s discarded DVDs than the X-rated softcore drama The Story of O. It was, of course, one of the DVDs I kept for my own collection before dragging the rest of the bin to our old porch steps. I don’t want to dwell for too long on why my sister purchased this vintage S&M smut or why she chose to get rid of it, which is partly why it took me over a half-decade to finally watch the film myself – allowing it to collect dust along with the rest of my dreaded Shame Pile in the meantime. I do know why I’ll finally be selling this disc off after just one single viewing, though, which is all I can dare to report on this blog.

The Story of O arrived in an era where pornography had delusions of going mainstream, initially under the guise of being distributed as European “art films.” This particular example of French erotica wasn’t nearly as seedy as its NYC contemporaries from the 42nd street epicenter of smut, but it was still considered filthy enough to earn an “X” rating in America and an across-the-board ban in Britain all the way until the year 2000 (a familiar treatment for the appropriately-named director Just Jaeckin, who had just experienced the same censorship for his debut feature Emmanuelle). The Story of O‘s eponymous source novel had experienced prudish censorship in its own time as well, penned under a pseudonym by journalist Anne Desclos in the 1950s only to face obscenity charges (in France of all places). It’s a modern continuation of the Marquis de Sade brand of S&M, where secret societies of immense wealth torture (in this case, consenting) women in cult-like rituals for communal sexual gratification. This movie adaptation wastes no time diving headfirst into that shamelessly contrived premise. The titular O (whose full name is never disclosed) is introduced en route to her masochistic training facility, on a car ride where her lover (a baby-faced Udo Kier) instructs her on what to wear and how to act as she suffers the ritualistic torture to come. We don’t learn until many whippings later that O is a fashion photographer with an inner life & artistic sense of control all of her own, since her submission to this secret sex cult is entirely predicated on her transformation into a pleasure object (and, later, a recruitment tool to draw in future pleasure objects from her industry). It’s an absurdly artificial scenario that immediately becomes grotesquely immoral if you prod at it in terms of real-world gender & sex politics, but it’s also a familiar one to anyone who’s ever spent a minimum of ten minutes reading erotica.

I was immediately struck by the soft-focus psychedelia of this film’s imagery, with its archaic occult S&M costuming and its obsessive reflections of mirrors against mirrors to achieve a kaleidoscope effect. It has all the gorgeous visual trappings of the artsy-fartsy Euro horrors of its era, just with the straight razor giallo murders being supplanted by sadistic sex acts. And, honestly, my only chance of ever truly loving the movie was if it had applied its soft-psychedelic imagery to the horror genre instead, since its repetitive tableaus of women “willingly” being whipped while saying “No” wasn’t really My Thing (in every implied meaning of that phrase). Its total lack of pre-play negotiation, agreed-upon safe words, and tender aftercare didn’t jive at all with how I engage with S&M in my own (admittedly modern) understanding of these sexual power dynamics. At risk exposing too much of my own internal erotic imagination here, I’ll admit that I did perk up once O started exhibiting control as a top in the dungeonous playpens where the movie gets its kicks (and in her fashion photography shoots, where she commands her models in a position of excited authority), but that’s more of a last-minute afterthought than a genuine engagement with any particular theme. The most interesting narrative thread in the film is about how the cathartic power play staged in the secret society’s closed-off rooms affects O’s public persona in “real” society (and how she gradually learns the pleasures of being the objectifier, not just the object). The only problem is that The Story of O is much less interested in themes & narrative than it is in the imagery of women being sadistically bound & whipped by men, which is either going to be Your Thing or it isn’t. No amount of visual aesthetic nor historical interest can save a niche porno you just don’t find pruriently enticing, just like how no stylistic flares can save a comedy you don’t find funny.

Speaking as an outsider to this particular corner of kink, it’s probably best to avoid passing any kind of moral judgement on the erotic imagination illustrated here. There are troubling ways in which this material is reflected in real-life misogynist violence, but that’s probably a large part of what makes the taboo so enticing in the first place. Also, not for nothing, the film is ultimately about female pleasure & self-discovery, whether or not it takes a rocky, roundabout way of getting there. All I can say is that it wasn’t really My Thing, which is something I already knew as soon as I picked it out of the Yard Sale pile. In retrospect, I probably would have gotten more pleasure out of seeing which of the curbside weirdos picked it out of the Yard Sale bin instead of hoarding it for myself.

-Brandon Ledet

The Virgin of Lust (2002)

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As you’ve likely noticed, there aren’t a whole lot of new releases out there right now. As a response to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, almost all cinemas have entirely shut down in order to adhere to proper “social distancing” practices, prompting movie studios to either unceremoniously dump this season’s new releases to VOD streaming platforms or to delay them for the indefinite future. This disruption of movie distribution has afforded me a lot of time to tackle what I call my “Shame Pile”: a bin of assorted DVDs & Blu-rays I haven’t watched since I purchased them. A few of my physical media purchases have rotted in that Shame Pile limbo for years, but none are quite as ancient nor as shameful as the 2002 Mexican melodrama The Virgin of Lust. The cloudy, bumpy texture of its plastic casing is the biggest indicator of that shame: it was a Blockbuster Video purchase. At one time, Blockbuster’s 4-for-$20 liquidation sales of used DVDs comprised the majority of my new movie intake, especially in the days when I was too broke & too busy to make it out to the theater more than a couple times a year (between working full-time in restaurants and attempting to graduate college). It’s been a full decade since there was a Blockbuster Video operating in New Orleans, though, so it’s genuinely shameful that it took me this long to work my way through the last of my purchases from that chain’s cheap-o cast-offs. In that way, watching The Virgin of Lust was more than just some lazy, prurient afternoon viewing to help pass the time during this period of coronavirus-incited isolation. It was also an end of an era.

Immediately after hitting play, it became apparent why I waited so long to give this film a chance. It’s just so shamelessly cheap. I mean that in regards to its actual price, its production values, its approach to sexuality, and its flavor of political commentary. This film is unequivocally, unashamedly Cheap. There’s nothing especially cinematic about its execution, to the point where it reads more like a televised stage play than a legitimate Movie – complete with that soap opera frame rate effect that makes all BBC shows look like trash, even the expensive ones. The bizarre thing is I suspect that Flagrantly Cheap quality was somewhat intentional. At the very least, it’s openly acknowledged by the text. The opening & closing minutes of The Virgin of Lust summarize the life & times of its protagonist in a series of quick-cut tableaus & block-letter intertitles that spell out their intent like a children’s book: “Life flows like a river,” “Every day’s the same,” etc. It feels more like a TV ad for a movie than the actual thing, but the film eventually acknowledges that effect with a closing title card that reads “Coming soon.” So, overall The Virgin of Lust plays like a three-minute movie trailer that’s interrupted by a 2-hour stage play as its mid-ad intermission. I’m not going to say the effect of this structure is transcendent or sublime in any way, but it’s at least memorably bizarre – which is also how the film feels at large.

Questions of funding & structure aside, The Virgin of Lust is a sordid melodrama about a 1940s café waiter in Veracruz who falls into unrequited love with an opium-addicted sex worker amidst revolutionary plots to assassinate Franco. Spanish ex-pats & revolutionaries pontificate at length about the best tactics to dismantle fascist institutions, but our central character does not have much of a political mind to speak of himself. He’s singularly obsessed with a beautiful, suicidal opium addict who literally stumbles into his life, only so she can spurn his every declaration of devotion out of disgust. Despite explaining flat-out,”I’m evil and a whore. You’re an idiot and poor,” the troubled woman cannot shake the worm’s adoration, so she chooses to milk him for all he’s worth as his reluctant dominatrix. The only actual sex in this vulgar telenovela are scenes in which the cruel mistress commands that the wormy waiter lick her feet—often in public—as a sign of subservience. Otherwise, we only see our lowly working-class protagonist masturbate over his carefully curated collection of pornographic photographs. At the start of the film his mantra for this masturbation ritual is “Titty, titty, pussy, pussy,” which he whispers to himself in hushed, reverent tones. By the end, his masturbation mantra shifts to “Franco must be killed, Franco must be killed,” more out of a misguided attempt to please his friends & mistress than out of any personal political beliefs. The rest of the film merely details the daily tedium of running a small café, punctuated by surrealist dips into vulgar S&M sexuality and performances of opera & lucha libre artistry for sordid flavor.

While the artists behind this film weren’t exactly nobodies, they were also nowhere near the top of their game at the time of production. Director Arturo Ripstein got his start working under surrealist master Luis Buñuel as an uncredited Assistant Director in the 1960s. The opium-addict mistress that ties the story together was played by Ariadna Gil years before she got her big break as the mother figure (and the Queen of the Underworld) in Pan’s Labyrinth. Both perform admirably here, but neither can escape the severe limitations of the production. A large part of The Virgin of Lust‘s stage-bound quality is the limitations of its budget, which do not allow for many setting changes or any exterior shots (given the expense of producing an accurate period piece outside the confines of a sound stage). The set decoration recalls contemporary Jean-Pierre Jeunet productions in its dulled, antique luster, but that patina isn’t enough to overpower the cramped feeling of the action rarely leaving the café. Ripstein seemingly embraced that effect instead of running away from it – approaching his story through the mediums he could afford on his budget: vintage photograph tableaus, stage play dialogue exchanges, movie trailer highlight reels, etc. As a result, The Virgin of Lust can’t help but feel small & inessential, so it puts all its effort into at least being memorable. Its jolts of vulgar S&M sexuality, lucha libre iconography, and anti-fascist politics ensure that it won’t be forgotten as soon as other disposable works on its budgetary level.

It wouldn’t really be fair to ask anything more than memorability out of a used DVD that’s been collecting dust on my shelf for a solid decade. I don’t know that I could enthusiastically recommend watching the film to anyone who didn’t already have it lurking in their shame pile, though. The Virgin of Lust is a trip, but it’s not a trip worth going out of your way for.

-Brandon Ledet

Ma vie en rose (My Life in Pink, 1997)

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When we recently reviewed all of Céline Sciamma’s back catalog for the podcast, the only film in the director’s portfolio that I couldn’t fully get on board with was Tomboy. The 2011 coming-of-age drama is a quiet, bare-bones portrait of children at play that illustrates in the simplest, most direct terms possible how limiting & cruel societal enforcement of gender traits is, which is especially apparent in how young kids are taught to socialize. I enjoyed Tomboy well enough, but it was clearly the slightest effort in Sciamma’s mighty catalog – adhering to a slice-of-life docudrama style that mostly avoids the transcendent catharsis of Sciamma’s superior works (with the exception of one indulgence in care-free bedroom dancing). Weeks later, I stumbled upon a fascinating counterpoint to Tomboy in Ma vie en rose (My Life in Pink), a Belgian film that had arrived more than a decade before Sciamma’s. Narratively, Tomboy and My Life in Pink are nearly identical. Both films follow a young child’s misadventures in a new school & neighborhood when they decide to introduce themselves to their peers as a different gender than what they were assigned at birth (and what their parents enforce at home). The difference between them is that My Life in Pink is the extreme opposite of a muted docudrama; it’s prone to frequent indulgences in hyper-stylized escapist fantasy, to the point where it’s practically a fairy tale. It gave me the small taste of transcendent catharsis I was searching for in Tomboy in overwhelming heaps, to the point where I was nearly choking on it. Given that the muted docudrama style of Tomboy is likely the more Intellectual approach to their shared subject, I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that I gobbled it up.

Ludovic is a seven-year-old child in suburban Belgium (which suspiciously looks like Tim Burton’s dreamlike vision of suburban America) who declares that she wants to live her life as a girl going forward, despite her parents’, school’s, and classmates’ insistence that she be treated and express herself as a boy. The social fallout from this self-declaration of trans identity plays out much the way you’d expect if you’ve ever seen a queer coming-of-age story before. My Life in Pink distinguishes itself less in the actions & trajectory of its characters than it does in the specificity of its style & setting. The nuclear-family suburban backdrop is perfectly illustrative of how gender is societally expressed, reinforced, and policed (even among young children, who are essentially genderless). The film opens with a rapid succession of Business Men husbands in the same suburban cul-de-sac zipping up their wives’ dresses, each in an individualistic way that perfectly illustrates their relationships with sexuality & marital tradition. Meanwhile, Ludovic is playing dress-up with his mother’s & older sister’s clothes & makeup in the family attic, a private moment of delicate self-fulfilling bliss that’s only shattered when she premieres her look-du-jour to the world and receives nastier feedback than anticipated. As an audience, we can predict everything that will happen to Ludovic & her family as her newly forming gender identity steps outside of what’s properly Allowed. Watching this particular kid navigate that painful process is still an enlightening experience, though, especially as we sink deeper into the private fantasy world she keeps hidden away from the cruel adults who’d prefer to lock her in a gender box that obviously doesn’t fit her shape.

The escapist fantasies Ludovic uses to dissociate from her cruel social conditions are the movie’s real selling point. They mostly revolve around a generic Barbie Doll-type character Ludovic is obsessed with, to the point where she frequently mentally projects herself inside the doll’s house & playset. This internal fantasyscape allows the film to indulge in bright, overly saturated colors & plastic dollhouse aesthetics as often as it pleases – blowing up a child’s inner world while playing dress-up to a worldwide playground outside their mind. It’s an aesthetic that also spills over to the stylized, ludicrously Artificial suburbia where Ludovic actually lives, given how the sunflowers are as huge as hubcaps and the neighborhood husbands all back out of their driveways perfectly in sync to start their collective morning commute. That’s not to say that My Life in Pink doesn’t take the day-to-day drama of its protagonist’s unfairly policed childhood gender identity as seriously as Tomboy does with its own. It just approaches that same subject from a more expressionistic, dreamlike lens. It very much feels like a product of its New Queer Cinema era, with a particular debt to how Todd Haynes explored real-world gay crises through a stylized fantasy lens (particularly recalling the segment of Poison about the boy who flew out the window). I don’t believe that approach is any more valuable or insightful than how Sciamma chose to frame the remarkably similar narrative of Tomboy; nor do I believe the opposite is true. Both the docudrama approach of Tomboy & the internal fantasy realm of My Life in Pink have their separate merits (and make for interesting contrast-and-compare companion viewing). I’m just such a sucker for the dollhouse fairy tale aesthetics of the earlier film that I can’t help but choose it as a personal favorite over its more stylistically muted counterpart.

-Brandon Ledet