erotic thriller

Lynch in Limbo, Culture in Decline

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Full disclosure: I have extremely unhip opinions about David Lynch.  The accepted wisdom among movie nerds is that late-style Lynch is the director at his best, with the titles Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire, and Twin Peaks: The Return earning frequent accolades as the absolute artistic pinnacle of cinema.  I find them borderline unwatchable.  My favorite Lynch titles are much better behaved: Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man, Original Flavor Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart … essentially, Lynch for normies.  It brings me no pleasure to take the conservative stance on this, wherein David Lynch was at his creative best when his vision was tempered by studio notes instead of being allowed to run wild.  In my tragically square view of his catalog, the last great movie he made was while working for Walt Disney Pictures, which is never the side someone wants to take in an argument.  So, I’ve done a lot of recent soul-searching on why, for example, Lost Highway works for me but Mulholland Drive does not, when they’re essentially the same inexplicable persona-crisis story told in two different ways.  Or why I enjoy the chaotic absurdism of Twin Peaks‘s second season that most fans hate, while I could not force myself to finish the third-season arc of the same television show that fans frequently cite as “The Greatest Film of All Time” on my Twitter feed.  It was during a recent screening of Blue Velvet at Canal Place (as part of their new Prytania Cinema Club series) when I finally came up with a theory.  Forgive me as I work it out on this blog as a form of public therapy.

It’s likely that Blue Velvet remains Lynch’s finest hour in my mind simply because it’s the very first film of his that I watched.  A feverish erotic thriller set down the street from where the Cleavers live, the film has a very accessible premise — perfect for teenagers desperate to see something strange & risqué.  Looking back as an adult who’s since seen all of Lynch’s features before & after, Blue Velvet paradoxically becomes both eerier and more familiar.  As literal as the film is about its peek into the grimy underworld just beneath the pristine surface of American suburbia (starting with the bugs & larvae wriggling below subdivision flowerbeds), it also indulges in capital-L Lynchian dream-logic imagery that cannot be fully explained without robbing its magic.  What do the closeups of a roaring wind blowing out a candle symbolize to the audience beyond association with the villainous Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), who has incorporated candlelight into his nightly sexual abuse routine?  To me, they become an abstract symbol of that violence, often equating the white-knight heroics of our doofus protagonist Jeffery Beaumont (Kyle McLachlan) to Booth’s violence by appearing during his own interactions with the victim that unites them (Isabella Rossellini).  Putting that association into words makes the image sound triter than it is in practice, though, especially since the link between hero & villain is vocalized multiple times in the dialogue (when Laura Dern’s virginal love interest says, “I can’t figure out whether you’re a detective or a pervert,” and, more directly, when Hopper says, “You’re like me”).  Maybe a more recent Lynch film would “explain” their connection entirely through the candle imagery without that accompanying dialogue, but the effect would more or less be the same.

The candle is only one isolated image among many that Lynch overloads with thematic significance; the longer you spend immersed in his world the more significance those totems take on.  It becomes significant that Rossellini hides her kitchen knife behind a radiator, since it recalls her fellow torch-singer who lives in a radiator in Eraserhead.  The hypnotic yellow lines passing under Frank Booth’s car recall Lost Highway.  Booth’s widespread smearing of red lipstick across his face before planting a Judas kiss on Jefferey’s mouth recalls the lipstick facemask of Wild at Heart.  When the camera pushes into the canals of a severed ear that Jeffery discovers in an open field, finding an entire inner world there, a modern audience recalls the same push-in to the interior of the Mulholland Drive puzzle box.  In retrospect, even just the casting of McLachlan, Dern, and Jack Nance feel like just as much of directorial calling cards as the heavy curtains Lynch always uses to mark his liminal spaces (in this case, Rossellini’s bedroom).  David Lynch has essentially been making the same movie his entire career.  He just repositions its building blocks into new, puzzling configurations as if he’s trying to work out a question he’s not fully sure how to ask.  In Blue Velvet, that internal interrogation seems to be fixated on self-disgust over the peculiarities of heterosexual male lust, especially in the Madonna/whore dynamic represented by Dern & Rossellini.  In the bigger picture scope of his career, he seems largely concerned with the manifestation of violence & Evil in an indifferent world.  Jeffrey’s melodramatic delivery of the question “Why are there people like Frank?” earned some ironic laughter in my theater, but I believe Lynch is posing it sincerely.  It’s a question he’s been asking over & over again for decades, often in fear that there’s even a fraction of Frank inside himself.

My theory on the divide between Lynch’s pre- and post-Mulholland Drive career, then, has less to do with how the director has changed than it does with how the world changed around him.  Not all of the heightened melodrama of Blue Velvet can be taken seriously.  If nothing else, Laura Dern’s recounting of a dream in which a flock of robins represent pure, universal love fully crosses the line from Sirkian melodrama to TV movie theatrics, inviting ironic chuckles from the audience.  I don’t know that Lynch himself is laughing, though.  He appears to find the mundanity of mainstream media to be oddly sinister, drawing out uncanny interactions from lesser artforms with just enough awkward pausing & ominous whooshing to make them genuinely nightmarish.  There’s a winking reference to the soap opera quality of Twin Peaks in the parodic inclusion of a fictional program called Invitation to Love, often playing on characters’ TV sets throughout the show.  Likewise, Blue Velvet draws comparison between the erotic thriller and the Old Hollywood noir by showing Jefferey’s mother watching old noirs on her living room TV whenever the audience passes through.  Mulholland Drive was also designed as an eerie abstraction of televised-drama aesthetics, as the majority of the film is a pilot for an ABC series that was famously rejected for being too uncommercial.  It’s the same approach to post-modern warping of mainstream media in all cases, but over time the cultural circumstances of that media changed.  When Lynch was finding the eerie world just below the surface of a Sirk film or a Days of Our Lives style soap, there’s a substantial, defined aesthetic to the source material that he’s working with.  Decades later, when he’s making the nightmare version of late-90s television in Mulholland Drive, the affect is flatter, uglier, less appealing.  The switch from celluloid to digital video in Inland Empire is emblematic of a steep decline in pop culture aesthetics across the board.  In other words, David Lynch did not get worse as time went on; the culture did.

Of course, this is all subjective, to the point where it might not even be coherent.  Given that there is currently a push to bring back the pop culture aesthetics of the late-90s and early-00s in the resurgence of low-rise Paris Hilton fashion, nu-metal rap rock, and “indie sleaze” college radio jams, it’s clear that there is some fondness for that era of cultural refuse that I cannot share in, possibly out of leftover embarrassment from being around when it was fresh.  The awkward acting & staging of Mulholland Drive reminds me of wasted hours of watching garbage-water melodrama on broadcast TV as a kid, desperately trying to squeeze entertainment value out of titles as insipid as Touched by an Angel and Walker, Texas Ranger.  The vintage television quality of that aesthetic might be a lot more romantic for a younger audience who wasn’t there to cringe through it in real time, the same way that I find the sinister reflection of 80s TV media in films like Blue Velvet to be mesmerizing.  If anything, I should be applauding David Lynch for keeping up with the times as his work evolved alongside the mainstream culture it subverts.  I might not personally be enthusiastic for his latest projects, but I’m also not cheering on his recent struggles to land funding, if not only because I know the pain of watching your favorite filmmaker get soft-censored by cowardly investors (having been left hanging by unrealized John Waters projects like Liarmouth & Fruitcake).  I’ve just come to realize that my personal split with Lynch is not a reaction to his thoughtfulness & seriousness as an artist; that has not changed.  It’s a reaction to The Great Enshittification of everything, positioning him as a found-materials artist who’s been given less & less substantial materials to work with as the quality in craft across all media has gotten generally worse (at least to my aging, Millennial eyes).

-Brandon Ledet

Death Dancers (1993)

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It wasn’t until decades after the genre’s American heyday that French critics coined the term “film noir”.  Meanwhile, noir’s younger, hornier dipshit cousin the erotic thriller was immediately self-labeled as a real-time marketing term instead of as a posthumous critical marker.  The recent documentary We Kill for Love is an excellent, exhaustive rundown on the erotic thriller boom of the 1980s & 90s, with specific attention paid to the cheaper, direct-to-video end of the genre.  There are some great insights throughout the doc, from how the bulk of the genre takes direct inspiration from Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill more than any of the more obvious Joe Eszterhas reference points to how its popularity was greatly aided by video rental stores’ desperate need to stock their shelves with off-brand substitutes for more popular studio titles that were in greater demand than supply.  For instance, someone who was disappointed that they could not rent a fresh copy of Basic Instinct might be tempted to take home the dominatrix-themed, Troma-distributed serial killer erotica Death Dancers instead until the shelves could be restocked.  There’s a vast difference in budget & quality between those two pictures, but the video store shelf was a great equalizer that presented them on the same level, with Death Dancers self-labeled as “An Erotic Thriller” on its cardboard sleeve to attract browsers’ attention.  That announced genre distinction might actually be somewhat of a misnomer, since Death Dancers shamelessly crosses the line from erotic thriller to softcore porno, featuring multiple scenes of fully nude actors grinding their pelvises together in rhythmic pantomime.  Given how gleefully vulgar mainstream players like Showgirls were at the time, though, I suppose the distinction is mostly meaningless.

Do you know what else is mostly meaningless?  Practically everything that happens in Death Dancers.  We open in the sunny, beachfront apartment of our central dominatrix figure (Deborah Dutch), as she wistfully whispers to the world outside her window about her past trauma, apparently eroticizing the memory of a forced miscarriage as she writhes in ecstasy on a kitchen chair.  She’s dressed in full goth drag in the middle of a sunny afternoon: black wig, black satin gloves, black stockings, black soul.  Despite the physical abuse she suffers in black & white flashbacks, her breathy narration is horny nonsense, including the titular tangent “Come dance with me. Come death dance with me.  Come, oh god, come death dance with me.”  Gradually, we gather enough info to piece together her M.O.  She’s the madame for a small army of female submissives whom she pimps out to male clients, luring in customers with phone-sex promises of total servitude.  Those customers quickly become victims, though, as her submissives are ordered to immediately murder anyone who physically harms them, even within a consensual kink scenario.  You see, our antiheroine dominatrix is fed up with the abuse she’s suffered from the men in her life, so she’s gotten into the serial-murder racket through the kink scene as a way to exact her revenge on the entire gender.  Meanwhile, an undercover cop who’s hot on her tail has similar flashbacks to trauma of his own. As images of the volatile pair’s pasts become increasingly entwined, the audience is eventually clued into how they found themselves locked into the never-ending death dance of their opposing professions in the first place.  It takes a minute to get there, but thankfully S&M strippers frequently mime group sex configurations in the background to help keep the energy up in the meantime.

Death Dancers is more music video than feature film.  Sleazy synth & sax numbers drone constantly as nude actors model whips, chains, sunglasses, breast implants, and high-waist panties under nightclub stage lights & bubble machines.  It’s just as much a relic of MTV-era music video artistry as it is a video store shelf-filler from the erotic thriller boom.  It’s pretty amusing as a Skinemax-flavored screensaver, especially once it pretends that it has a Hitchcockian mystery worth solving when it’s really just a horny mood piece.  I can’t claim to have seen all of the hundreds of titles referenced in We Kill for Love as the bulk of the direct-to-video erotic thriller genre (at least not until I clear them from my disgustingly overstuffed Letterboxd watchlist), but I still recognized this as an exceedingly generic entry in the canon despite the S&M angle of its premise.  Death Dancers only made an impression on me in that it had me thinking, “This is fun & all, but it’s no Stripped to Kill 2: Live Girls” and then, naturally, “I need a new hobby.”

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Blind Date (1984)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the erotic Greek sci-fi thriller Blind Date (1984).

00:00 Oscars

04:45 Hundreds of Beavers (2024)
08:10 Eye of the Cat (1969)
11:42 Mamma Roma (1962)
16:16 Raising Arizona (1987)
19:20 Drive-Away Dolls (2024)
24:40 Dick (1999)
27:53 The Ritz (1976)
33:30 Gasoline Rainbow (2024)
39:03 Sleater-Kinney
41:05 Rebel Dykes (2021)
46:25 How to Have Sex (2024)
51:43 Blood of the Virgins (1967)

55:05 Blind Date (1984)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Lagniappe Podcast: Demonlover (2002)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Olivier Assayas’s early-aughts hentai thriller Demonlover (2002).

00:00 Welcome

02:45 X (2022)
07:45 Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)
11:45 Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)
15:25 Past Lives (2023)
24:08 Asteroid City (2023)
37:10 Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1979)

41:55 Demonlover (2002)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Podcast Crew

The 4th Man (1983)

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Paul Verhoeven is the great American satirist.  There’s only the small matter of him being Dutch.  In his 80s & 90s Hollywood heyday, Verhoeven was the master of self-satirizing American pop culture, riding a fine enough line between moralist condemnation and gleeful participation that his cartoon parodies of Hollywood schlock were often mistaken for the genuine thing.  Titles like Showgirls, Starship Troopers, and Robocop were often overlooked as biting American satires in their time, mostly because Verhoeven was obviously taking perverse pleasure in the exact sex & violence he was chastising mainstream audiences for craving.  He was making truly subversive art, in that he was subverting the meaning & intent of his oblivious Hollywood collaborators with a self-satirical exaggeration of the industry’s cruelest, most salacious smut.  His mainstream films were, without hyperbole, among the greatest ever made and, as such, were often misunderstood by critics & audiences in their own time.

You did not need me to repeat that tidbit of recent pop culture history.  Verhoeven’s subversive Hollywood works have been reassessed to the point where their covert satirical genius is now common knowledge (even if that cultural reassessment hasn’t translated to more robust budgets for his more recent, small studio works like Benedetta & Elle).  What’s less often discussed—among American audiences anyway—is what Verhoeven was up to before he reached Hollywood, as his early Dutch features currently have no legal distribution in the US.  If his semi-supernatural erotic thriller The 4th Man is any indication, Verhoeven arrived here as an already fully formed auteur, since the film essentially functions as a Basic Instinct prototype (with some light touches of Benedetta for added flavor).  And if The 4th Man is not typical to the movies Verhoeven was making pre-Hollywood, you’ll have to forgive me for the assumption.  I only got to see this one because a friend bought a bootleg DVD copy off of eBay; the rest remain a mystery.

Jeroen Krabbé stars as a hotshot alcoholic novelist who travels to a small town to big-time his fan club at a public reading of his work.  He quickly falls in lust & bedsheets with the literary club’s treasurer, Renée Soutendijk, an obvious femme fatale who will quickly lead to the buffoonish author’s doom.  He suffers bad-omen visions of his own death throughout his travels, but powers through them for the promise of hot sex, both with Soutendijk and with her younger boytoy lover, Thom Hoffman.  Unlike in Basic Instinct, it isn’t the ice-cold blonde bombshell who’s a bisexual hedonist, but rather the himbo-dingus who trips all over himself lusting after her (and her accessibility to hot trade).  Exactly like in Basic Instinct, whether that bombshell is a murderer or a sexually liberated innocent is a Schrodinger’s box game that Verhoeven teases the audience with all the way through the end credits.  Only, this version of the story follows a different genre template, going for more of a small-town-witchcraft Wicker Man vibe instead of foretelling Basic Instinct’s cop-falls-for-murder-suspect neo noir revival.

Verhoeven’s meta-satirical exaggerations of Joe Eszterhas’s sleazy Hollywood scripts are artistically subversive.  With no major-studio industrial tropes or morals to subvert, The 4th Man is, by contrast, simply artistically blasphemous.  Verhoeven’s Dutch dry-run/wet-dream precursor to Basic Instinct is just as hyperviolent and explicitly horny as his later Hollywood films, but outside of the Hollywood system its shock-value offenses register more as a personal indulgence than an act of cultural satire.  When Krabbé envisions Hoffman’s heaving, sweaty gym body rocking a tight red Speedo on the crucifix, Verhoeven is not exactly subverting cultural or religious norms.  He is perverting them for his own amusement.  When Soutendijk’s witchy femme fatale leads her boytoys to their ruin by the prick—sometimes snipping those pricks off entirely in castration nightmare sequences—Verhoeven is not subverting misogynist Hollywood tropes about women’s poisonous effect on men; he’s celebrating her transgressive power.  The closest he comes to true subversion in The 4th Man is in an early sex scene, when Krabbé covers Soutendijk’s breasts to pretend she is “a boy”, thrusting into him, flipping the power dynamics of the traditional nude scene into something overtly queer.  Even then, it still feels like he’s only doing so to delight himself and to shock the audience, not necessarily to declare something political about sex in cinema.

If there’s any way that Verhoeven doesn’t feel like a fully formed auteur in The 4th Man, it’s in the film’s similarities to Euro cinema of its era, from the bitter romantic doom of Barbet Schroeder’s Maîtresse to the intense reds & witchy dream imagery of supernatural gialli (complete with an echo of Fulci’s signature ocular gore).  He couldn’t reach his full power as a subversive pop culture satirist until he left Europe for America, where his blasphemous indulgences in sex & violence could punch upwards at Puritanical social norms instead of just delighting the man behind the camera.  The 4th Man‘s greatest asset, then, might be cinematographer (and longtime Verhoeven collaborator) Jan De Bont, who stretches the budget with as many on-the-fly crane, zoom, dolly shots as he can manage to match the look & feel of mainstream Hollywood filmmaking.  Judging only by The 4th Man, it’s clear that Verhoeven was already making great films before he reached America; all that really changed was finding a cultural context that made them feel politically dangerous instead of just deliciously perverse.

-Brandon Ledet

Breathless (1983)

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The most impressive thing about the 1993 genre spoof Fatal Instinct is that it riffs on two genres at once.  1980s & 90s erotic thrillers were already such a direct photocopy of 1940s & 50s noir that it’s difficult to tell where one genre’s tropes end and the other’s begin in that Carl Reiner goofaround.  It turns out that Fatal Instinct had already been outdone by the 1983 remake of Breathless, though, which adds a whole other layer of post-modern cultural ouroboros to the noir nostalgia cycle.  Whereas Fatal Instinct is a disposable novelty that clowns about at the intersection of erotic thrillers & classic noir, Breathless makes an extra pit stop at Jean-Luc Godard’s doorstep to translate that genre overlap into high art – the very pinnacle of the artform, even.  If anything, the entire Hollywood noir experiment was only worthwhile so that it could be filtered through French New Wave art snobbery and then later perfected in this 80s pop art orgasm.  I’m only partially kidding.

I was surprised to swoon so hard for the 80s Breathless update, since the 1960 original didn’t exactly wow me when I saw it at the New Orleans French Film Fest in 2018.  I did appreciate the ways its flippant story of a womanizing car thief was blatantly influenced by American gangster pictures, filtered through a more casual, hands-on French New Wave aesthetic, then later filtered again through New Hollywood crime pictures like Bonnie & Clyde back in America, and the cycle goes on. I struggled at times with the poisonous machismo of the film’s chain-smoking antihero, though, even though he admits up front to being an asshole and most of the humor positions him as the butt of the joke. Even with all that self-deprecation, the movie thinks he’s a lot cooler than he is.  The original Breathless has a handheld, exciting immediacy to it that makes its place in the Important Movies canon immediately apparent, but it could easily be remade as a (hyperviolent) Pepé Le Pew cartoon, which was a huge turnoff for me at the time.

The remake doesn’t really do anything to soften or rehabilitate its party boy hedonist antihero other than casting a young, hot-to-trot Richard Gere in the role.  Somehow, that’s more than enough.  Gere’s performance as the heartbreaking, carjacking Jesse Lujack is just as much of a slimy little shit as Jean-Paul Belmondo was in the original, but he’s a thousand times cooler while smoking a thousand fewer cigarettes.  And maybe that’s just a result of my ignorant biases as an uncultured American.  This is the one American remake of a foreign art film I can name that out-performs its source material specifically because it is American.  Gere plays around with Silver Surfer comics, Jerry Lee Lewis cassette tapes, and loaded revolvers as American fetish objects, packaging his brash boyishness as a rock n’ roll cowboy routine – a young, dangerous, beautifully idiotic nation personified.  He makes total sense as a lethal object of desire, luring a French college student (Valérie Kaprisky) to ruin through his roadside-diner sex appeal.  Well, that and his muscular, naked body.

The Breathless remake is a post-modern pop art melt down.  You don’t need to hear the third-act Link Wray needle drop to know Tarantino drooled all over this in his formative years as a pop-culture obsessed video store clerk.  It dresses up 1950s jukebox rock in the sneers & plaids of 1980s punk.  Before Gere starts fiddling with his library of cassettes in a stolen Cadillac, it’s not even clear what decade we’re in.  Is the Argento crosslighting of the dive-bar neons supposed to feel modern & fresh, or is it a throwback to the rock n’ roll diners of old?  Is this more of an erotic 80s update to the Godard original, or a colorized echo of the noir films that inspired it?  You can’t mistake the country it’s set in for any other place in the world, though.  As much as the 1960s Breathless was in love with American crime pictures as the pinnacle of the artform, its 1980s remake was the real deal – truly American in all the best & worst ways, and truly the height of cinema.

Full disclosure: I had already written and scheduled this review before it was announced that Jean-Luc Godard had died at 91-years-old. I’m noting that timeline just to make it clear that I did not post this as some kind of gotcha putdown of a great artist who recently passed. If anything, it speaks to Godard’s influence on the medium of filmmaking that his work was already on the tip of some amateur, genre-nerd blogger’s tongue before his name was in the daily headlines.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #166: The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) & Remakes

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Welcome to Episode #166 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of movie remakes, starting with the 1981 erotic thriller version of the classic noir The Postman Always Rings Twice.

00:00 Welcome

01:31 Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris (2022)
07:17 Menace II Society (1993)
12:45 Mad God (2022)
18:25 Gigli (2003)

25:25 The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981)
47:05 Scarface (1983)
1:05:00 Father of the Bride (2022)
1:28:00 The Blob (1988)

You can stay up to date with our podcast by subscribing on SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn.

– The Podcast Crew

Maîtresse (1975)

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Why is it that every movie about a dominatrix follows the same trite storyline where the hardened, leather-clad woman in charge softens the moment she finds a romantic partner who can lower her defenses?  From corny, vintage domme media like Body of Evidence & Exit to Eden to more modern, thoughtfully considered dramas like Dogs Don’t Wear Pants & Pvt Chat, every feature-length depiction of a dominatrix’s love life I’ve seen is framed through a macho “I can fix her” POV.  That tradition apparently dates at least as far back as 1975’s Maîtresse, in which a young, bumbling thief (Gérard Depardieu) falls in love with an experienced dominatrix (Bulle Ogier) despite being baffled by her profession, then schemes to break her “free” from the lifestyle.  It’s up there with Basic Instinct as one of the more nuanced, subversive movies about sexually dominant women that I can name, but it still plays directly into the dominatrix romance’s most tired cliché.

What’s funny about Maîtresse‘s narrative phoniness is that director Barbet Schroeder is obviously proud of its Authenticity in every other metric.  His in-your-face, documentarian approach to Authenticity can be a little tiresome, like in moments when a horse is slaughtered & drained for butcher meat on-camera, or when the titular mistress nails one of her client’s dicks to a wooden board in full surgical detail (a stunt thankfully performed by a real-life professional, not Ogier).  It’s an incredible asset to the film’s mise-en-scène, though, especially in the dominatrix’s play dungeon.  Schroeder hired a professional domme to ensure the legitimacy of the kink scenes’ props & practices.  The camera’s awed pans over the mistress’s tools of the trade or her clients being dressed in lingerie and ridden like horses (some, apparently, clients of the sex worker hired to oversee the shoot, getting off on the humiliation of being filmed) are electric in their documentation of vintage BDSM play.  I somehow doubt that real-life dominatrix was also consulted for the story beats of the central romance, though, which is a shame.

To be fair, Maîtresse does directly challenge the macho POV of its in-over-his-head protagonist.  Depardieu plays a real mouthbreather, a thug who’s visibly intimidated by the whips & leather gear he finds in the play dungeon he burgles before wooing the dominatrix who owns it.  For her part, Ogier’s mistress character clearly explains to her new thief boyfriend that she is no damsel in distress, saying “I couldn’t do it if I didn’t like it.”  He attempts to “rescue” her from her comfortable, voluntary sex work routine anyway, and every drastic knucklehead action he takes on her behalf only makes her life worse.  Although the story is framed through the thief’s POV, he is introduced to the audience picking his nose on his motorcycle, undercutting whatever brutish cool he could possibly convey with the same dipshit goofiness that makes the thieves in Mandibles so laughably ineffectual.  Maîtresse may participate in the same “I can fix her” trope as every other dominatrix romance I’ve ever seen (Hell, for all I know it may have been responsible for creating it), but at least the central relationship in this specific example is dramatically complex.

This is essentially the story of two mismatched tops struggling to dominate each other, both barreling towards ruin because they won’t do the obvious thing and break up.  I’m always a sucker for stories where characters are compelled to repeatedly do things that are obviously going to kill them just because it makes them super horny; this version is even somehow refreshingly sentimental in its romance . . . when it wants to be.  Karl Lagerfeld’s fetish-fashion designs for the dominatrix’s wardrobe also afford it some wonderfully vivid imagery.  Genital torture & horse deaths aside, Maîtresse is commendable.  It’s only when I stop thinking about it as an individual work and consider it instead in the larger continuum of how dominatrices’ inner lives are portrayed (or ignored) on-screen that I’m disappointed it didn’t transgress in even more pointed, narrative ways.

-Brandon Ledet

Deep Water (2022)

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If you have any inclination to check out the new direct-to-Hulu erotic thriller Deep Water, it’s because you’re a fan of at least one of its main three collaborators: Adrian Lyne, Ben Affleck, or Ana de Armas.  No offense meant to down-the-call-sheet performers like Tracy Letts & Lil Rel Howery—nor to Euphoria-famous screenwriter Sam Levinson—but Lyne, Affleck, and de Armas are the film’s only legitimate draws.   Deep Water‘s allure is entirely dependent on extratextual details from those three Hollywood celebs’ careers and tabloid notoriety.  Not only is it the first Adrian Lyne film in 20 years, it’s also a return to the genre that made him infamous in the first place: erotic thrillers like 9½ Weeks, Fatal Attraction, and Indecent Proposal.  It’s also a film that’s only hype-building press coverage was of Ben Affleck & Ana de Armas’s post-production love affair, as detailed in months-long paparazzi photo shoots.  Otherwise, Deep Water does not truly exist in any practical or meaningful way, having been unceremoniously dumped into a Disney streaming platform sub-dungeon after a couple years of COVID-related distribution delays.  You need to care about at least one of its three central collaborators to know or care about Deep Water to begin with, and you need all three of them to be in top form for the movie to fully satisfy.  Unfortunately, it only edges you 2/3rds of the way there.

Ben Affleck & Ana de Armas are blameless in the movie’s failure to perform.  De Armas is electric as a frustrating housewife-gone-wild, whose extramarital affairs appear to be equally for their own drunken-hedonist sake and a kinky role-play game she shares with her cuckolded husband, Affleck.  As amusingly erratic & irritating as her performance can be, Deep Water is Ben Affleck’s movie through & through.  He’s in his Gone Girl mode here, scruffy & gloomy to the point of self-parody.  He pretends to be troubled by his wife’s sexual flings with younger men, only putting up with it to avoid divorce while they’re raising a young daughter.  De Armas knows exactly how much fun he’s having as the silently “suffering” husband at home, though, quipping “If you were married to anyone else, you’d be so fucking bored you’d kill yourself.”  What’s unclear is whether he’s staving off boredom by killing her lovers, and whether his wife is aware that murder is part of their kink.  Like clockwork, each of her boytoys either go missing or are found dead as a new affair heats up, then she immediately replaces them with the next victim-du-jour.  In the meantime, Affleck dutifully attends to their daughter and to his own coterie of pet snails, occasionally bragging about murdering his wife’s lovers with a self-amused smirk, daring the audience to believe him.  It’s a deeply strange performance, an even more convincing supervillain origin story than Joker.  All it’s missing is a scene where Affleck gets dragged away to Arkham Asylum, exclaiming “I was poly under duress until I became The Snail, avenger of cuckolds, the Willard of adultery!”

It’s a shame, then, that the director fails to reciprocate his actors’ efforts.  Adrian Lyne is limp & passionless in his framing, as if he knew from the beginning this was a straight-to-streaming affair.  The novelty of the uptown New Orleans setting offers little in the way of personality, unless you were somehow unaware until now that the wealthy are depraved perverts with no sense of taste.   There are some nods to tropes of the erotic thriller’s heyday, mostly in de Armas’s unhinged villainy as an over-sexed woman and in Affleck’s more covert villainy as a ruthless businessman (this time as a tech-bro contributor to drone warfare, an update to Michael Douglas’s finance-bro jobs in decades past).  The sex scenes are brief and missing the gender-warfare combativeness that made the genre’s original run so thrilling to begin with.  The most antagonistic the sex gets is when de Armas demands that Affleck kiss her ass, and Lyne follows his immediately buried face in uncomfortable close-up.  You can feel the movie come alive in moments like that, like when she spitefully removes a single pube from her tongue after initiating a blowjob she had no intent to finish.  The problem is those moments feel like foreplay for a literal war-of-the-sexes that never fully heats up.  And then, cruelly, the movie abruptly ends without a proper payoff – again, no intent to finish.  It feels as if Lyne wasn’t sure what he was making or why, leaving it to the editors to figure it out in post.  Too bad Paul Verhoeven didn’t get the job instead, since he already improved Lyne’s Fatal Attraction through revision & parody in Basic Instinct: the very best specimen of the genre, and proof in itself that Lyne is kind of a hack.

Deep Water is fun in spurts, but it’s missing a few escalated sex scenes and a proper climax.  There’s only one dead-weight participant in its central threesome, but it’s enough to spoil everyone else’s good time.  Affleck at least seemed like he had fun playing with those snails, but the whole movie needed to be as off-putting & slimy as his hobby.

-Brandon Ledet

Ema (2021)

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I’m currently catching up with this year’s Oscar nominees in my down time, a shameful ritual that I mostly use as a motivational deadline for movies I planned to seek out anyway.  The Oscars can’t bully me into watching keeping-up-with-the-discourse titles like Belfast or Don’t Look Up!, since I have no personal interest in their existence beyond how they might play into this year’s ceremony.  The nominations are useful for pressuring me to seek out prestige flicks leftover from the Best of 2021 listmaking season, though, and I’ve recently enjoyed catching up with titles like Parallel Mothers, Nightmare Alley, Summer of Soul, and The Worst Person in the World since they were announced.  So far, there has only been one major disappointment in this year’s catch-up ritual: the Princess Diana biopic Spencer.  I hate to say it, because I’m generally a fan, but Kristen Stewart’s performance as Diana Spencer is the only reason it did not work for me, and it happens to be the only category the film was nominated for (Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role).  Spencer‘s retro couture, ghostly imagery, and suffocating tension are all consistently effective, but Stewart’s the anchor of every dramatic beat and it all just rings as embarrassingly phony.  It feels like a Kate McKinnon parody instead of the genuine thing.  That didn’t bother me so much when Natalie Portman channeled Jinkx Monsoon in its spiritual predecessor Jackie, but Spencer feels like it’s running away from the laidback cool of Stewart at her best, and the gamble just didn’t pay off.

What’s most frustrating about Spencer‘s dramatic disappointments is that director Pablo Larraín did deliver a stellar, accolades-worthy picture in 2021 that’s mostly going unnoticed while the inferior one’s out there chasing awards statues.  Ema would not have qualified for this year’s Academy Awards even if it were the kind of picture that institution tends to recognize (it’s far from it), since COVID derailed its distribution in a messy, years-long path from its festival run in 2019 to widely accessible screens.  I would at least have liked to see it celebrated on more critics’ Best of the Year lists, though, which tend to have a less pedantic approach to citing a film’s official release (i.e., accounting for wide distribution rather than limited screenings in elitist hubs like Cannes, Venice, New York, and LA).  Even I failed to highlight Ema as Best of 2021 material on my own modest platform, waiting to access a DVD copy as a library loan instead of spending $5 to see it VOD before weighing in on Swampflix’s Top 10 list for the year.  That DVD was eventually put on hold for me this February, and if I were re-drafting my personal Best of 2021 list again today Ema would have ranked among my top three favorites of the year (along with Titane & I Blame Society, all great films about violently transgressive women).  I can at least take solace in knowing that it ranked on Hanna’s personal Best of 2021 list for this site and, more importantly, that none of this listmaking or awards-season bullshit ultimately matters anyway.  It’s all an overly complicated movie promotion machine, a process I can sidestep at any time simply by saying this: Ema is a great movie, and I highly recommend you seek it out.

Part erotic thriller, part domestic melodrama, and part interpretive dance, Ema feels like Almodóvar doing Climax, which I mean as the highest of compliments to Larraín.  A young couple become pariahs in their Chilean town by returning their son to his adoption agency after ten months of parenting, as if they were returning a faulty home appliance.  The son’s absence haunts their household like the ghostly presences of Jackie & Diana in Larraín’s political psych-thrillers.  Only, Polo is alive & retrievable in a nearby home – adopted out to a new, more affectionate family.  Gastón (Gael García Bernal) is content to deal with the fallout of Polo’s exit by endlessly debating who was the worse parent with his wife/employee, Ema (Mariana Di Girolamo).  Ema takes a more pro-active approach to restoring order to the family, scamming her way into Polo’s new household Parasite-style and—no exaggeration—burning down half of their town with a flamethrower until she gets what she wants.  She leaves her subservient life as an anonymous member of her choreographer-husband’s avant-garde dance troupe to form a vicious girl gang who are willing to fuck, scratch, dance, and burn the world to the ground in Ema’s name.  Meanwhile, she only grows more powerful the further she drifts away from her husband’s petty criticisms of her moral character (ranging from her ineptitude as a mother to her ill-reputable taste in reggaeton dance music).  The film can only end with every character in Ema’s orbit observing her infamy in stunned silence, impressed but horrified by how much chaos she’s willing to unleash in order to get her kid back – a kid she once casually tossed away.

As the title and synopsis suggest, the film is in awe of Ema as a character more so than it is interested in the logistics of its drama.  She recalls the subversive anti-heroines of erotic thrillers past – like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, with a severe bisexual haircut to match.  It’s like being intensely horny is her superpower, a force so overwhelming it bends everyone to her fucked-up will.  Wielding a napalm-dripping flamethrower is only her second most dangerous weapon, considering how much more societal terrorism she achieves through sex (along with her harem of fellow dancers).  Ema the character is alone a spectacle to behold, and it feels like every other aspect of the film exists only in service of admiring her from different angles.  The domestic melodrama she shares with Gastón only exists to highlight her viciousness, as the doomed couple use memories of their collective failure as parents to inflict maximum pain on each other in constant emotional cheap shots.  The reggaeton & interpretive dance sequences add a lyrical exuberance to her city-wide mayhem, making it clear that she’s having fun ruining the lives of everyone around her in the relentless pursuit of her selfish goals.  Even poor Polo is only a mirror reflection of Ema’s fantastic wickedness, as his maternally inherited hedonism & pyromania are exactly what drove him back to the adoption agency in the first place.  And the flame thrower?  That just makes Ema look like a badass, like Rambo wielding a rocket launcher.

All the things I admired about Jackie & Spencer are readily present in Ema: the unbearable tension, the over-the-top costuming & theatrics, the fascination with the inner lives of Complicated Women, all of it.  The difference is that the historical drama is an inherently more restrained genre than the erotic thriller, no matter how much Larraín tries to mussy up his performance-piece biopics with arthouse mystique.  Ema is totally free to be its fabulous, fucked-up self with no respect owed to historical figures or the conventions of good taste.  It’s a shame that its distribution was so muddled by the chaos of COVID, since it at least could have earned as big of a cult following as Titane in the right circumstances (which landed on Hulu within months of winning the Palme d’Or).  I can only hope that Ema gradually cultivates that kind of following over time, and I encourage anyone who enjoyed Titane to give this sinister spectacle a shot as well; it’s the closest any film has come to besting it for my favorite release of 2021. 

-Brandon Ledet