kink

The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (2024)

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Calling an actor’s performance “vulnerable” is often just a delicate way of saying they appear nude on screen in sub-glamorous circumstances.  Actor-writer-director-editor Joanna Arnow appears to be acutely aware of this critical cliche, which she goes out of her way to mock & undercut in her sophomore feature The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed.  After spending a third of her screentime lounging around nude in a lover’s cramped, poorly lit New York City apartment, she bends over to spread her buttcheeks for the older man’s pleasure, and he dryly declares “Now that’s vulnerable!”  It’s one funny punchline among many in a movie that’s more like a comic strip diary than an autofictional novel.  Joanna Arnow’s vulnerability is essential to the text, as she plays a fictionalized version of herself (named Ann, for short) opposite her real-life parents and a small cast of suitors who illustrate real-life anecdotes of misadventures in kink-scene dating.  Given the fictional Ann’s extensive experience with BDSM, it’s tempting to read Joanna‘s “vulnerability” as a public humiliation kink, but the truth is it’s not any more extreme than most semi-autobiographical comedies about an indie filmmaker’s NYC dating life (see also: Flames, Pvt Chat, Appropriate Behavior, etc.).  Arnow’s just willing to make a joke at her own expense after indulging in that narcissistic ritual.  Now that’s vulnerable!

Almost every scene of The Feeling has a set-up and punchline rhythm to it in that way.  It’s a film made entirely of short clips of low-stakes, emotionless interactions in which the joke is just how banal it feels to be alive.  We bounce around the three tidy corners of Ann’s limited existence—work, family, sex—where she’s constantly being told what to do by elder micromanagers.  At work, she’s ordered around by corporate-speak bureaucrats; at home, by adorably sour parents.  At her on-again-off-again dom’s apartment, she’s ordered around by a middle-aged man who’s just as indifferent to her presence as everyone else in her life, except with an added layer of opt-in roleplay.  The only relief from this universal indifference is the sanctuary of Ann’s undecorated apartment, where there are no pets or hanged pieces of art personalizing her space.  She is a character defined by absence of characteristics, which is darkly hilarious in scenes where doms command her to tell them what she desires and she can’t come up with anything specific, defaulting instead to stock-character roles like Fuck Pig or furniture.  In most BDSM relationship dynamics, it’s the sub’s job to tell the dom what to tell them to do, so the heroic journey of our protagonist is all in learning how to assert herself and define her own personality against a world that’s so deeply, oppressively bland.  It feels incredibly good when she gets there (and incredibly terrible when she backslides).

The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed is the driest comedy you’ll find outside a Roy Andersson film, which is funny to say about a BDSM confessional where no single scene lasts longer than a minute.  Most of its filmic artistry is in Arnow’s tight control of the edit, which both trims completely static interactions down to concentrated bursts of social tension and tells a larger story of personal growth through selective sequencing.  The audience can always tell exactly how emotionally invested Ann is in her various romantic & sexual relationships by how long Arnow is willing to linger with them.  When she’s trying to branch out from her long-term dom/sub relationship, the movie takes on a speed-dating rhythm that cuts between the various doofus men of NYC in rapid-fire clips.  When she’s indulging in her very first genuine romantic partnership, it maintains its average short-burst scene length but shows fewer interactions outside that relationship, putting her workplace and homelife annoyances on the backburner for a stretch (much to the audience’s relief).  If you catch Ann squeezing a sad envelope of room-temperature beans into a microwaveable glass bowl to eat for dinner alone, you know that she’s not particularly invested in any of her current relationships. It’s all told in editorial curation, which is the only element of the film with a pronounced sense of style; everything else is contained in a purposefully flat, digital, Soderberghian void.

If Joanna Arnow is expressing anything about herself to the audience through the avatar of Ann, it’s a young person’s anxiety about not being especially good at anything.  Ann is bad at her job, bad at small talk, bad at roleplay, bad at folding laundry, bad at everything.  She’s super relatable in that way, especially for anyone who was socially suffocated by overbearing parents and then unleashed unto the world at 18 with the expectation that they’re a fully formed adult with their own defined personality & desires.  Those efforts to define herself might’ve lacked specificity without the BDSM angle of her love life, so it’s for the best that Arnow chose vulnerability instead of cowering from cliche.

-Brandon Ledet

Singapore Sling (1990)

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It took a couple weeks of diligent blog posts & podcast recordings to review all thirteen screenings I caught at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, of which the major highlights were local premieres of Don Hertzfeldt’s Me, Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo, and Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow.  Overlook recaps are never complete if you only cover what movies you saw at the fest, though; it’s just as important to report on the movies you took home from the fest, thanks to the consistent, essential presence of boutique Blu-ray distributor Vinegar Syndrome as an on-site vendor.  I pick up killer genre obscurities from the Vinegar Syndrome table every year, mostly because I’m prompted to select titles I’ve never heard of before by their striking cover art and by the curational nudging of a knowledgeable sales rep.  I’ve left past Overlooks with blind-buy purchases of Nightbeast, The Suckling, and Fleshpot on 42nd Street – all bangers.  This year’s highlight purchase was a recent in-house restoration of the 1990 Greek sexploitation thriller Singapore Sling, a movie that jumped out at me through the striking black-and-white S&M iconography on its slipcover and that over-delivered on the debauchery that graphic promises.  Equal parts horror, noir, and pornography, it’s gorgeous high-art smut: the exact qualities Vinegar Syndrome regulars search for in the label’s extensive catalog.  It’s almost unbelievable that it’s a new release for the company, since it feels just as perfectly calibrated to their brand as early, signature VS titles like The Telephone Book.

There are three separate narrators in this sordid domestic drama, all of whom directly address the audience in stage-play soliloquy.  One is the titular Singapore Sling (named after a cocktail recipe, the only scrap of identification that can be found on his person); he’s a macho noir archetype who’s taken hard to alcoholism as his years-long search for his beloved, vanished Laura has proven fruitless. Tracking Laura’s ghost to a mysterious, remote mansion, he meets our other two narrators: the dominatrix owner of the estate and her childlike nympho daughter – a mother-daughter duo who are introduced to the audience roleplaying as the missing Laura and engaging in incestuous, fetishistic sex with the aid of a strap-on dildo.  You see, they most definitely killed the missing woman, along with dozens of unnamed servants buried in a mass grave under their home’s flower garden, because they are wealthy and thus depraved.  Like all noir protagonists, our POV character is doomed as soon as he stumbles into the web of these femmes fatales.  They immediately beat him into concussion, tie him to a bedframe with ropes & leather straps, and take turns raping him while teasing out whether he’s aware of their similar abuse of the mysterious Laura.  Speaking of which, the name “Laura” is repeated by all three players with feverish, orgasmic frequency, and it eventually proves to be a direct allusion to the classic 1940s Otto Preminger noir, complete with out-of-context references to Laura’s broken lake house radio.  Whether you ever thought the noir genre could use a little sprucing up with proto-torture-porn sensibilities is dependent on your personal interests as an audience, but I can at least say I’ve never seen that exact combination before.

Singapore Sling is incestuous femdom erotica filtered through the filmmaking aesthetics of classic Universal monster movies.  The father figure of the family home is dressed up like the Boris Karloff version of The Mummy and stored in the attic as an artifactual sex object.  The women of the house keep some traditional BDSM restraints & tools lying around, but they also incorporate perplexing electrical equipment seemingly borrowed from the set of James Wale’s Frankenstein into their “play” (i.e., rape & torture).  Its black-and-white horror sensibilities are warmly familiar, but its rape-fantasy logic feels genuinely dangerous outside the context of privately read erotic fiction, which is only slightly eased by it being played as a taboo freak-out instead of a pure turn-on.  I haven’t felt this shameful while falling in love with a movie since I first watched The Skin I Live In, and its cheeky provocations don’t feel all that out of line with Almodóvar’s general schtick.  I haven’t yet seen any other features from director Nikos Nikolaidis, but it appears that shock & provocation are constant in his work, evidenced by the 2011 documentary of the Vinegar Syndrome disc that features a montage of his actresses pissing & vomiting in a wide range of violent, sexual scenarios.  Here, pissing & vomiting are their versions of cumshots, and their concussed captive has no choice but to lie back and take it until there is a chance to escape.  I have no reference for where Nikolaidis was positioned in the Greek cinematic imagination in his time, but I do see direct evidence here that he was at least influential on currently ascending Greek provocateur Yorgos Lanthimos, from the outlandish incest of Dogtooth to the fruit-flavored masturbation and classic-monster visual cues of Poor Things.

There’s almost no way to recommend Singapore Sling without sounding like a carnival barker luring rubes into a geek show.  Indeed, the film does have a Spider Baby quality to its “Get a load of these freaks!” premise, which never expands beyond hanging around a decrepit mansion with sexual deviants until everyone involved is fucked to death.  For all of its kink & gore, though, it’s a strangely calm, quietly eerie affair, mostly scored by the soft meditation-app rain patter of the “sick and sad” world outside the mansion walls.  It’s not the kind of kill-a-minute splatstick horror that punctuates every sequence with an active disemboweling; it’s the kind of off-putting, degenerate horror that collects the organs from a disemboweling to arrange into sensual tableaux, decorated with victims’ jewelry for perverse beauty.  That stomach-turning disorientation is better experienced than described, which makes this an ideal blind-buy home video experience.  It’s easily my favorite film I’ve picked up from Vinegar Syndrome’s merch table at Overlook, where I consistently gamble on titles without the hive-mind knowledge of the internet informing my purchases.  Relying only on the box-cover artwork and the guidance of Staff Picks at that table is the closest I get to the vintage video store experience in this post-Blockbuster Video world (at least until Future Shock Video gets a storefront going in the not-too-distant future, many many bus rides away). I look forward to it every year almost as much as I look forward to the official selections on the Overlook program. 

-Brandon Ledet

Piaffe (2023)

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Piaffe is a post-adolescence coming of age story about a shy adult shut-in who musters up the courage to learn new things about her desires, her body, and her self outside her cloistered home.  In doing so, she grows a horse tail, has masochistic sex with a perverted botanist, and takes on a new trade as a commercial foley artist.  Most of the events that transform her life & body are a natural matter of course rather than a deliberate, personal choice.  The foley artist job falls in her lap when her nonbinary mystic sibling is unexpectedly institutionalized, leaving her to complete their work providing horse-riding sound effects for a TV commercial advertising a mood stabilizer called Equili.  She gets into character as the horses she soundtracks by clopping dress shoes onto wooden dresser drawers, which causes her very own horse tail to grow from the base of her spine. Her sexual relationship with the botanist is more of a personal choice than something that happens to her, but it’s a choice she can only make after truly getting to know herself as a literal horsegirl with increasingly specific sexual desires – mostly involving getting her tail hair brushed.  Falling somewhere between the stern kink dynamics of the dark 2000s office romance Secretary and the flippant, prurient surrealism of the 1970s dark fantasy piece The Beast, Piaffe is funny, sexy, cool, and inexplicable, but never in an especially showy way.

It isn’t the movie’s fault, but there was something grim about watching Piaffe the same week that England’s premiere auteur fetishist Peter Strickland was stress-tweeting about struggling to find funding for his next project.  One of our greatest working directors can’t get a new movie off the ground, and yet he’s formidable enough that younger artists are out there making (pretty great, possibly unaware) pastiches of his work.  Piaffe plays as just as much of a career-retrospective overview of Peter Strickland’s style as his recent music industry satire Flux Gourmet, which likewise combined his foley-art giallo throwback Berberian Sound Studio with his kink-dynamic relationship drama The Duke of Burgundy into a single, self-spoofing work.  The ASMR phone sex of Piaffe, wherein our equestrian protagonist brushes her tail hair over a telephone receiver to excite her lover, feels like a gag pulled directly from a Strickland film that doesn’t yet exist.  And given that Strickland is struggling to land funding for his next project, maybe it never will.  What Piaffe offers is a sturdy Strickland substitute that proves he’s not the only filmmaker who can reliably deliver weird-for-weird’s-sake fetish comedies for the midnight movie crowd; in that context, it’s maybe the best of its kind since The Berlin Bride.  I can still only take it as a consolation prize, though, as I’d unquestionably list Strickland among the most exciting artists working in cinema right now (alongside Amanda Kramer & Bertrand Mandico), so I’m bummed to hear he’s not currently working on anything at all.

For all I know, Piaffe director Ann Oren has never seen a Peter Strickland film, and their parallel sensibilities are entirely coincidental.  My only previous exposure to Oren is in her outsider-art Hatsune Miku cosplay documentary The World is Mine, which is specifically about the erosion and erasure of identity within a digital-age fandom “community.”  I will refrain from assuming anything about her based on this high-art horsegirl cosplay erotica follow-up, except maybe that experimentation with new, fabricated identities & personae is an artistic preoccupation of hers – something that can only be confirmed as she establishes a larger body of work.  I have hopes that, in time, Oren will prove to be just as formidable a prankster artist as Strickland.  It’s something I already felt in this film’s fetishistic fixation on the mechanical tools of filmmaking & horseback riding, grazing its fingertips over leather harnesses and the rusty metal gears of an ancient zoetrope.  I just need to see more of her work to know what to anticipate in the next picture.  Meanwhile, I already know what I want & get out of Strickland’s films, and I’m stuck looking for those qualities elsewhere while he’s twiddling his thumbs waiting for someone to sign the checks. 

-Brandon Ledet

Good Boy (2023)

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Scandinavian cinema has a distinctly fucked up sense of humor to it, so it’s not surprising that two of the year’s best black comedies have been released out of Norway.  Kristoffer Borgli’s debut feature Sick of Myself (in which an art-world narcissist medically self-harms for media attention) is the higher profile of the two, already landing the director a buzzy follow-up starring Nic Cage (in Dream Scenario).  By contrast, the darkly comic Tinder thriller Good Boy is a much smaller, limited production – restricted to just four characters shooting in four sparse locales.  Despite earning a few key critical accolades on the festival circuit (including a coveted spot-on John Waters’s Best Films of the Year list), Sick of Myself is hardly an MCU-scale cultural behemoth worth rooting against in favor of its underfunded underdog.  Still, running only 75 minutes and released to zero fanfare, Good Boy is a fucked up little Norwegian romance drama worth championing for its minor, muted victories, at least so director Viljar Bøe might be able to torture audiences on a much bigger scale in his next production.  There’s plenty of dark Norwegian humor to go around.

Good Boy might not have a professional-level budget, but it does have a killer hook.  It’s a story of unethical puppy play, pulling some uneasy laughs and genuine chills out of the basic discomfort of stumbling into someone else’s elaborate kink scene without context or warning.  After scoring a successful Tinder date with a legitimate millionaire, an unsuspecting Psychology student is introduced to her new beau’s unconventional pet: a human man who spends 24/7 in a dog costume.  Any cautious probing about the weirdness of keeping a human being as a house pet is outright dismissed by the Norwegian Psycho; he responds to reasonable questions like “What’s his deal?” with “He’s a dog.”  Of course, because this is a movie, it turns out the dog’s deal is much sicker than that, and his loving captivity within the millionaire’s household turns out to be less voluntary & consensual than initially let on.  Much less.  The story gradually devolves into full-on torture porn from there, but much in the way that the equivalent American dating-app thriller Fresh did last year: maintaining a wicked sense of humor throughout.  It’s all one big joke about dating a total control freak; he just happens to be a very specific kind of freak.

For all of its kink-scene iconography, Good Boy is less about the degenerate amorality of real-life puppy players than it is about the violent amorality of stubbornly Conservative thinkers, recalling the sickly domesticity of recent titles like Swallow & Hatching.  It dodges a lot of the kink-shaming implications of its premise by doubling down on something we can all agree on: the ultra-wealthy are the world’s true degenerate freaks.  It undeniably banks on the viewer’s kneejerk discomfort with other people’s private kink play scenarios, though, drawing just as much terror out of the human-dog’s elaborate furry costuming (his mask has a hinged jaw!) as it does out of the violence that keeps him living the fantasy.  Speaking personally, the movie didn’t change the way I think about narcissist millionaires, trad homesteaders, or proudly kinky puppy players.  However, it did change how I interacted with my dog for the next couple days, causing me to pause while feeding her, pilling her, and getting her ready for bed to consider just how strange of a relationship we have on either side of the pet-owner divide.  It may not be an especially deep movie, thematically, but it still made something familiar & routine feel totally alien & horrific in its immediate afterglow, which is all I can really ask for out of a prankish, low-budget horror movie.

-Brandon Ledet

Love and Leashes (2022)

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The two genres I’ve noticed thriving exclusively on Netflix in recent years have been cutesy romcoms and steamy erotica.  The erotic thriller heyday of the Verhoeven 80s and the romcom heyday of the Meg Ryan 90s have long been absent from theatrical marquees, so Netflix has stepped in to, um, fill those gaps, so to speak.  Somewhere between the quiet success of titles like 365 Days (erotic), To All the Boys I’ve Love Before (romantic), Deadly Illusions (erotic), and Always Be My Maybe (romantic), the streaming behemoth has gotten its algorithmic wires crossed and decided to split the difference with an erotic romcom set in the Korean kink scene, Love and Leashes.  Not since Gary Marshall’s Exit to Eden has kink play been treated with such a fluffy, mainstream, sexless touch (unless, of course, you include other recent Netflix properties like the kink-themed sitcom Bonding or the kink-themed home improvement show How to Build a Sex Room).  And since Netflix does not share verifiable data about their streaming numbers, we’ll never know how much demand there is for such an unlikely mix of theme & tone . . . unless they start commissioning more romcom erotica to fill out their splash page in the next couple years.  All I can say for now is that Love and Leashes is as adorable as its existence is absurd.

This is a cutesy, formulaic comedy about an unexpected BDSM office romance, essentially Secretary re-imagined as a femdom romcom.  When a new hire at a media marketing firm risks having his human dog collar shipped to work, his vanilla (but kink-curious) coworker accidentally receives the package instead. In their struggle for possession, the seedy Amazon order flies in the air as they both fall to the ground, flustered.  It’s a kinky re-imagining of the standard dog walking meet-cute of two destined-to-fuck strangers getting tangled up in leashes while trying not to spill their Starbucks orders.  Only, the rope bondage comes much later in the plot.  The man is sensitive and turned on by masochistic play; the woman is naturally bossy but uninitiated to the scene.  She finds a genuine thrill in transgressing the assumed submissiveness of her gender roles, though. She also uses the excuse of learning more about her new co-worker’s fetishes to attempt dating him in a more traditional, romantic dynamic.  Sometimes they play at work, charged by the thrill of potentially getting caught.  More often, they test the uneasy waters of their new mistress/sub dynamic in hotel rooms and in public, both pretending they’re only into the kink activities, not each other (for reasons that can only be explained as Romcom Brain).  It’s the kind of nothing conflict that could be solved by a single, honest conversation, but that’s true of most romcoms, with or without the leather gear.

Of course, there’s an inherent incompatibility in attempting a romcom/erotica genre mashup; most traditional romcoms are excessively chaste.  As a result, Love and Leashes is strangely sexless, considering all the butt plugs, harnesses, and ball gags that hang in the background as set decoration.  In terms of actual, onscreen sexual activity, the most we get is some flogging, hair-pulling, foot worship, rope bondage, and the same dripped-wax fantasy as the “Livin’ La Vida Loca” music video.  We can hear sex in the next hotel room over, but we’re in the room where a man is wearing a leash and yipping like a dog for comic effect – no insertions necessary.  This might have bothered me more if the pup’s mistress-in-training didn’t ask (in Sex and the City-style narration) “Is it weird to play this hard without having sex?”, noting the absurdity of their chaste dynamic.  She spends a lot of time online researching the standard dynamics of domme-sub relationships and chatting up anonymous kink veterans on message boards for newbie tips (setting up an obligatory, last-minute Gossip Girl reveal), totally unaware of how much sex she should be having with the sub under her “control.”  A lot of the central conflict is in the weirdly out-of-sync couple finding a way to enjoy transgressive kink play and start up a traditional, adorable romance on vanilla dates – the same conflict the movie has in its own dueling tones.

This is both my first K-drama and the first movie I’ve seen adapted from a “webtoon” (originally titled Moral Sense), so I can’t speak to how well Love and Leashes translates its source material to a new medium.  I’m an expert in scouring Netflix for low-level horny novelties, though, and it’s one of the better attempts at harmless erotica I’ve seen on the platform.  It’s a little sexually timid & cruelly overlong, but it’s a decent throwback romcom with just enough naughtiness to make the genre’s stalest tropes feel freshly amusing & cute.  The obvious next step for the platform is to get into the business of romcom softcore, but we’ll have to see how well this mashup does before they take that risk.

-Brandon Ledet

Crimes of the Future (2022)

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He has not announced plans to retire, but if Crimes of the Future does end up being David Cronenberg’s final film, it would be an excellent send-off for the director’s career.  Just as A Dirty Shame registers as the perfect marriage between John Waters’s early-career transgressors and his late-career mainstreamers, Crimes of the Future lands midway between the sublime body-horror provocations that made Cronenberg famous and the philosophical cold showers he’s been taking in more recent decades.  It’s less of a complete, self-contained work than it is a loose collection of images, ideas, and in-jokes aimed at long-haul Cronenberg sickos.  It’s got all the monstrous mutation & fleshy, fetishistic penetration of his classic era, which makes it tempting to claim that the body horror master has returned to former glories.  It presents those images in the shape of his more recent, more talkative cerebral thrillers, though, as if to prove that nothing’s changed except that’s he’s grown out of a young man’s impulse to gross his audience out.  Crimes of the Future is the kind of film that’s so tangled up in the director’s previous works that it makes you say things like “‘Surgery is the new sex’ is the new ‘Long live the new flesh'” as if that means anything to someone who isn’t already a member of the cult.  And yet it might actually be a decent Cronenberg introduction for new audiences, since it’s essentially a scrapbook journal of everywhere he’s already been.

If there’s anything missing from Crimes of the Future that prevents it from reaching Cronenberg’s previous career highs, it’s not an absence of new ideas; it’s more an absence of narrative momentum.  Much of it functions as a dramatically flat police procedural, gradually peeling back the layers of a conspiracy theory that never feels as sharp or as vibrant as the future hellworld that contains it.  It’s a pure, playful exercise in complex worldbuilding & philosophical provocation, which are both major markers of great sci-fi no matter what narratives they serve.  Cronenberg essentially asks what our future world will be like once we inevitably accept the New Flesh mutations of his Videodrome era body horrors, as opposed to recoiling from them in fear.  He imagines a scenario where the pollution of accumulating microplastics in our bodies has triggered a grotesque evolution of new, mysterious internal organs that are hastily removed in surgery as if they were common tumors.  Meanwhile, our new bodies have essentially eradicated pain, making the general populace a depraved sea of self-harming thrill seekers.  A murdered child, an undercover cop, a network of paper-pushing bureaucrats, and a nomadic cult of proud plastic eaters all drift around the borders of this new, grotesque universe, but they never offer much dramatic competition to distract from the rules & schematics of the universe itself.

Crimes of the Future is at its absolute best when it’s goofing around as a self-referential art world satire.  Its most outlandish sci-fi worldbuilding detail is in imagining a future where high-concept performance artists are the new rock stars.  Viggo Mortensen stars as “an artist of the interior landscape,” a mutating body that routinely produces new, unidentifiable organs that are surgically removed in ceremonious public “performances.”  Léa Seydoux stars as his partner in art & life, acting as a kind of surgical dominatrix who penetrates his body to expose his organic “creations” to their adoring public (including Kristen Stewart as a horned-up fangirl who can barely contain her excitement for the New Sex).  Cronenberg not only re-examines the big-picture scope of his life’s work here; he also turns the camera around on his sick-fuck audience of geeky gawkers & fetishists.  It’s all perversely amusing in its satirical distortion of real-world art snobbery, from the zoned-out audience of onlookers making home recordings on their smartwatches, to the hack wannabe artists who don’t fully get the New Sex, to the commercialization of the industry in mainstream events like Inner Beauty Pageants.  Although it appears to be more self-serious at first glance, it’s only a few fart jokes away from matching Peter Strickland’s own performance art satire in Flux Gourmet, its goofy sister film.

I hope that Cronenberg keeps making movies.  Even five decades into his career, he’s clearly still amused with his own creations, when there’s big-name directors half his age who are already miserably bored with their jobs.  Hell, he doesn’t even need to create an entire new universe next time he wants to write something.  Crimes of the Future‘s plastic gnawing, organ harvesting, surgery-fucking future world is vast & vivid enough to support dozens of sequels & spin-offs.  It turns out you don’t even need much of a story to make it worth a visit.

-Brandon Ledet

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

Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop: How to be a Sex Goddess in 101 Easy Steps (1992)

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Before phrases like “sex positivity” & “kink” wormed their way into my vocabulary as a horned-up youth, Annie Sprinkle already embodied them in my mind as a sex-culture mascot.  Like other retro fetish icons like Bettie Page & Dita Von Teese, Annie Sprinkle has seemingly always been around in the public eye as a cheerleader for fun, adventurous sex – reaching me before I was old enough to access pornography without parental surveillance.  I don’t know if I first encountered her in a magazine interview or on a late-night broadcast of HBO’s Real Sex, but she’s definitely one of the first cultural ambassadors for kink & sex positivity that penetrated my sheltered suburban bubble.  Long before I had seen a single frame of her golden age pornos, she symbolized the ways that pornography could be fun & feminist in the right circumstances, which helped shape the ways I think of the medium.

While the mainstream porno Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle is likely her biggest commercial success, I don’t think Sprinkle peaked as artist until a decade later, when she was making avant-garde video art instead of traditional hardcore.  The cult VHS oddity Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop: How to be a Sex Goddess in 101 Easy Steps is a tongue-in-ass-cheek instructional video promoting kink & sex positivity, a wonderful document of the Annie Sprinkle ethos.  Co-directed with a young Maria Beatty (who still makes artsy fetish videos like Ecstasy in Berlin, 1926) and scored by experimental electronic musician Pauline Oliveros, the video is ostensibly a taped version of Sprinkle’s sex-positivity workshops that she ran in early-90s NYC but is something much stranger & more cinematic than that documentation implies.  In the video version of the workshop, Sprinkle lectures directly to the camera about the mystical slut/goddess binary. She promises to “awaken your inner slut” and “your inner goddess,” challenging cultural biases that a sexually enthused woman is somehow vulgar or immoral.  She walks you through this spiritual slut awakening in front of surreal green screen video-art effects while arhythmic keyboard flourishes, marching drums, and slide whistles trigger a kind of D.I.Y. psychedelic hypnotism.  Sprinkle declares that she wants the video to make sex “empowering, liberating, and healthy,” but in the process she also makes sex a bizarre psychotronic head-fuck.

While commercially marketed as a porno, the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop plays more like experimental video art than it does like pure erotica.  It’s telling that Sprinkle & Beatty tacked on a lengthy threesome scene at the end of the video as an afterthought, realizing late in production that their sex video didn’t have much actual sex in it.  And even that scene concludes with Sprinkle experiencing a five-minute, unedited orgasm, lecturing about the different levels of orgasmic pleasure in voiceover while a digital clock counts every eternal second.  Everything that precedes that mind-blowing climax lands somewhere between the high-art mysticism of Derek Jarman’s The Garden and the psychedelic sketch comedy of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!.  A kaleidoscope of vulvas undulates on the screen while Sprinkle instructs on how to find “your goddess spot” and makes cheeky puns about how genital piercings make you “holier.”  Brief sex acts shared between her crew of “Transformation Facilitators” are transposed in front of backdrops that are usually reserved for karaoke screens.  The video is often hot and always fun, but it’s less pornography than it is Dianetics for your clit.

As you’d likely expect, not all of Annie Sprinkle’s sex-positive politics have aged gracefully over the past three decades.  The Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop has some major blind spots when it comes to cultural appropriation in particular, encouraging superficial Orientalist engagement with yoga & bindis as cultural costuming instead of genuine spiritual practices.  In the audio commentary on my mid-2000s DVD copy of the film, Sprinkle shrugs off the insensitivity of these missteps, explaining that she didn’t even know what cultural appropriation was at the time of filming.  However, she also recounts that those aspects of the workshop caused some of the video’s more radical performers to walk off-set in protest on the first day of filming, so those conversations were very much being had at the time whether or not she chose to listen.  Still, I’d like to think that it’s worth squinting past Sprinkle’s political blind spots to appreciate her ambassadorship for good sex and good pornography.  After all, she does have an entire section on her Wikipedia page titled “Contributions to Feminism,” which should be some implication of how important her messaging was at the time, short sights aside. 

If there’s anything especially radical about the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop, it’s not necessarily in its erotic mysticism or in its video-art psychedelia.  Annie Sprinkle’s most invigorating contribution to pornography is in her D.I.Y. punk ethos, encouraging her audience to have more playful sex and even to make their own pornography at home.  It’s the same mobilizing energy that the Riot Grrrl movement brought to feminist bands & zines at the time, inciting women to make their own self-liberating art in defiance of the era’s cultural gatekeepers.  Sprinkle’s version just happened to allow her to experience a continuous 5-minute orgasm in the process, which is a pretty sweet bonus if you can achieve it.

-Brandon Ledet

Pvt Chat (2021)

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I got so wrapped up in reflecting on how Adam Sandler’s career & persona reshaped the Safdie Brothers’ usual schtick in Uncut Gems that I forgot to mention the true standout discovery among its many NYC-caricature performers: Julia Fox.  As Sandler’s breathy, pouty mistress/employee, Fox softened Uncut Gems‘s acidity with a much-needed sweetness you won’t find elsewhere in the film.  At the very least, she’s the only character who finds the continuous fuck-up anti-hero adorable instead of despicable, and it’s oddly cute watching her play moll to his delusions of mafioso grandeur.  Fox felt refreshingly authentic & eccentric in the same way a lot of the Safdies’ NYC caricatures do, except with an unusual star power that had me leaning in for more, unsure that more would ever arrive.

2021 has been a pretty decent year for Julia Fox’s post-Uncut Gems career.  Not only did she land a small role in Stephen Soderbergh’s star-studded neo-noir No Sudden Move, but she also found an opportunity to co-lead a feature film that plays directly into her strengths as a screen presence (and, thus, one that’s unavoidably reminiscent of the Safdies’ grimy NYC filmmaking style).  Pvt Chat is a grim internet-age romance starring Fox as a camgirl dominatrix with the world’s wormiest fuckboy client (Peter Vack).  She spends most of her screentime domming the porn & gambling addict from the safety of a webcam, taunting him, “spanking” him, and using his tongue as a virtual ashtray.  Even when she’s playing mean in these exchanges, there’s a sweetness to her persona that leaks out of her patent leather armor.  It’s a dangerous allure for her character, whose approachability inspires her online client to become her on-the-street stalker.  It’s a huge benefit to her as an actress, though, proving that her radiant performance in Uncut Gems was not a one-time anomaly.  Julia Fox is the real deal.

Pvt Chat is not so much a Safdies photocopy as it is pulling inspiration from the same independent NYC filmmaking subcultures that inspire them.  It drags the late-night grime & mania of New York City livin’ up the fire-escape and onto the laptop computer, icing down the city’s up-all-night genre traditions with the cold isolation of life online.  It’s classic No Wave filmmaking echoed in 1’s & 0’s; it’s Smithereens for the Pornhub commentariat.  Pvt Chat declares itself to be “a romance about freedom, fantasy, death, friendship.”  In truth, it’s more about how all modern relationships have been completely drained of their intimacy through our transactional, performative online interactions.  It presents a world where intimacy is an illusion for purchase, not an authentic shared experience.  Setting that crisis in a city overflowing with genuine, in-the-flesh people only makes it more tragic (and more perverse).

There are some instances in which Pvt Chat‘s nostalgia for independent NYC filmmaking of yesteryear gets in its own way.  In particular, the way Julia Fox gradually falls for her sadboy crypto-bro client feels like the kind of pure masturbatory fantasy that would’ve been much more common on the 1980s & 90s film festival circuit than it is now.  Imagine a boneheaded version of Taxi Driver where Cybil Shepphard & Robert DeNiro genuinely hit it off after their porno theatre date on 42nd Street.  Personally, that romantic development didn’t ruin the film for me.  It arrives after so many preposterous, manic decisions made by late-night lunatics that it felt oddly at home with the movie’s M.O.  More importantly, even when the doomed lovers do physically connect, the movie does not abandon its themes of isolation & performance.  It perverts the consummation of their shared desire in a way that still leaves them physically alone & unfulfilled.  Maybe the movie is all in service of a delusional fuckboy fantasy, but it at least seems aware of how pathetic & grim that fantasy is.

Even if the unlikely central romance of Pvt Chat is a turn-off for most audiences, the movie is still a worthy vehicle for Julia Fox.  She commands the screen (and the screen within the screen) with an infectious ease that still has me leaning in for more.  It’s incredibly cool that her acting career wasn’t limited to a one-off novelty; she’s a goddamn star.

-Brandon Ledet

Cowards Bend the Knee (2003)

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In retrospect, I was being redundant when I described last year’s The Twentieth Century as feeling like “watching Guy Maddin direct an especially kinky Kids in the Hall sketch that stumbles out into feature length in a dreamlike stupor.”  That assessment still rings true, but I could’ve lightened my wordcount by just saying it felt like “watching a Guy Maddin movie”.  I’m used to seeing playful flashes of violence & vulgarity in Guy Maddin’s work, but something about Matthew Rankin’s kink-soaked debut doubled down on both in a way that really spoke to my juvenile sensibilities.  It turns out my oversight was in comparing The Twentieth Century to the statelier, well-respected Maddin of recent years, the one who’ll interject a Sparks music video about a man’s addiction to “derrieres” in the middle of his narratives but will stop short of fixing his camera on an ejaculating cactus for a minutes-long visual gag.  Guy Maddin was once a young button-pusher himself, though, something that should have been obvious to me even before I made the time to watch his own early-career kink comedy Cowards Bend the Knee.  It turns out I was just a few years too late in my Guy Maddin appreciation to catch him in his prime as a juvenile provocateur.

In Cowards Bend the Knee (or The Blue Hands), Guy Maddin reimagines (and improves!) the silent horror classic The Hands of Orlac as a kinky sex comedy about hairdressers, prostitution, abortion, hockey, and revenge.  Instead of a morally simplistic body horror about a concert pianist who becomes murderous when his hands are surgically replaced with a serial killer’s, Maddin abstracts his version in a Russian nesting doll story structure that’s long been familiar to his features.  We start with scientists examining a sperm specimen under a microscope, revealing in close-up that the sperm cells are hockey players competing on ice.  The star player is Guy Maddin as “Guy Maddin,” the team captain and son of the distinguished announcer who calls the games.  He’s pulled aside from his championship victory celebrations by a distraught girlfriend who’s just discovered she’s pregnant, which leads the couple to a hair salon & brothel that triples as an illegal backroom abortion clinic.  Maddin leaves his girlfriend mid-abortion for the madame’s beautiful daughter, who will not let him touch her body until her father’s death is avenged.  Her plan for retribution, of course, involves her father’s severed hands being surgically attached to her new lover’s body to guide his way.  Also, his old girlfriend is now a ghost who works at the salon.

Like all of Guy Maddin’s movies, Cowards Bend the Knee is deliberately aged & battered to look like an authentic curio from the earliest years of silent cinema.  Images often stutter & repeat in harsh jags as if the projector is struggling to feed the deteriorating film from reel to reel.  That antiqued image quality offers a great contrast to the shameless sexual fetishism of the film’s winding Greek tragedy plot.  Despite its title’s mention of legs, this is a film that’s fixated on the perversity of hands in particular.  From the more obvious kink acts like incest, fisting, and female-dominant wrestling to the unexpected eroticism of a haircut, the film presents the shape & use of hands as if they were the filthiest appendages on our bodies.  And maybe they are.  Maddin even accentuated the film’s sexual transgressions by premiering it as an art instillation where viewers watched each six-minute chapter as individual vignettes through key holes, as if peering into a bedroom (or a sex dungeon).  It’s all very silly and tongue-in-cheek, but it’s also surprisingly thoughtful & genuine in its presentation of sexual fetishism and the way its magnetic pull can lead you to making desperate, self-destructive decisions.

The Saddest Music in the World taught me that Guy Maddin is a goofball prankster despite his work’s formalist exterior.  Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary taught me that he’s a bit of a luddite with a loving eye for the tones & textures of German Expressionist horror.  The Forbidden Room taught me that he works best in short-form vignettes that pulls the audience deeper into exponentially smaller worlds.  All of those aspects of his work were already firmly set in stone as early as Cowards Bend the Knee, but that one still taught me something about him that made me fall even further in love with his art: he’s also a filthy pervert.

-Brandon Ledet