Libertine London

Sexing A Paragrab

Libertine London - 
Sex In The 
Eighteenth-Century Metropolis
By Julie Peakman
Reaktion Books Ltd
ISBN 9781789148473

Just a quick shout out for a delightful book I was gifted a couple of Christmases ago and, because of various issues in my life (such as an overabundance of new books to read), I have only now just got to indulge in. Subtitled Sex In The Eighteenth-Century Metropolis, the tome Libertine London by sexual historian Julie Peakman (now there’s a candidate for nominative determinism if ever I saw one) is a stunning tour through the streets, gardens, palaces and brothels of the time and it’s extremely interesting, especially if you live in the capital as I do and know many of the streets in question. 

So the book starts out explaining the vast gap between male and female libertines and then, as it goes chapter by chapter through the book, makes clear a kind of hierarchy of so called ‘fallen women’. Such as the differences between streetwalkers, bawds, courtesans, strumpets, mistresses and so on. It also goes through the repercussions of the various ‘choices’ made by the ladies in question, how they were publicly perceived and, often as not, publicly punished for their position in society. Some became famous, some made their fortune several times over... many were not lucky enough to do either and came to a sticky end. But whatever their final fate, Peakman paints their tales in a sympathetic and informative fashion... and you can really tell she’s done her research. 

And when I say informative, some areas were truly enlightening. 

For instance, I knew just from logically breaking down the silliness of the male mind that sex workers selling their trade from a bawdy house or brothel could fetch more money from a client at the time if they were deemed a virgin. So I assumed many lied about their sexual status to increase the purse but I didn’t realise to what lengths they would go to fake their virginity... such as the stitching up of their hymen. Or, as in the case of the fictional Fanny Hill but, obviously drawn from the real life practice, going down to the local butcher with a sponge and soaking up some blood so, in the heat of their customer’s passion, they could quickly splash the blood from the sponge now secreted in their room onto their vagina to make good on their claim and up the price.

The book uses transcripts from legal documents and cases to build a picture of some of the women who populate this magnificent tome, describing what it was like to live in a London fraught with peril where robbery, rape and violence ruled the streets and back alleys. Peakman also uses popular printed pamphlets and books about various women, sold on the streets at the times, to cross reference and validate some of the details of the biographies but, not all is taken as seriously as the original writers would have liked, as there was obviously a lot of spice added to the ‘accounts’ sold for public consumption at the time. 

And the book is also handsomely illustrated with various items such as full colour reproductions of famous paintings of many of the ladies discussed herein (many of which I imagine hang in galleries to this day) and also things like newspaper pages and satirical cartoons of the time, commenting on the various stories of specific ladies being discussed. 

Such interesting details come to light such as the fact that if a bawdy house did not contain any beds, then there was no obvious evidence to the law that it was a brothel. Or that the celebrated courtesans of their day, such as actresses and ladies receiving ardent admiration from people higher up the food chain such as governors or royalty, were pretty much seen as the pin up girls of their day. It talks about the way that the better off courtesans of the day could hire a box at the theatre so that suitors could line up to engage their activities for later in the evening, for example. And I was also interested and, somewhat, mollified that the medical profession was just as distrusted in those times as it seems to be becoming again now, in these days of post-pandemic distrust of our governmental resources like the much maligned but somewhat hard to negotiate auspices of the NHS. 

And that’s me just about done with Libertine London - Sex In The Eighteenth-Century Metropolis, other than to say I found this one really interesting and am actively seeking out other books by Peakman in a similar vein (a recent trip to Foyles snagged me a nice hardback copy of her volume Licentious Worlds so, that’s another in the queue). If you’re interested in this kind of subject matter you will surely find the rewards between the covers as illuminating as I.

Tokyo Decadence

Lost And Bound

Tokyo Decadence
Japan 1992 Directed by  Ryû Murakami
Region 2 DVD

Warning: Slight spoilers in here...
or at least an indication of a lack of them.

Tokyo Decadence is written and directed by Japanese novelist  Ryû Murakami and based on some of the short stories from one of his collections. I’ve not read any of this guys books (who I believe is no relation to famous novelist Haruki Murakami, who I like a lot) other than one by him called In The Miso Soup. I remember that book being quite raw in terms of its subject matter and, because of this, I guess I was expecting a little more edge to Tokyo Decadence than I found.

My prime reason for wanting to see this movie... asides from the obviously raunchy sexual content implied by both the title and the cover art... is because the film stars Miho Nikaido as the main protagonist. Miho Nikaido is, or possibly was (I’m never quite sure) the wife, or possibly just long term girlfriend, of my favourite living director Hal Hartley. I used to watch her in Hartley films such as Flirt (the first one I saw her in at a London Film Festival screening some years ago), The Book Of Life and Henry Fool (among others). She’s always been an actress whose work I respect, admittedly due to her being in films I love so much, and I knew that, if nothing else, she would certainly be able to carry whatever film she starred in, if necessary.

Here she plays Ai, a prostitute who specialises in aspects of BDSM... what used to be called good old S and M when I was a kid. Indeed, the madam who arranges her clients, along with the other girls working the same profession, refers to their clients as either wanting an S person or an M person... meaning they want to hire a sadist or a masochist (or top or bottom as they are known over here). All the girls switch between either role and the very first pre-credits scene of the movie is, in fact, the most intriguing...

We see Ai tied to a leather, adjustable chair. She is then, much to her anxiety, injected with something by her client. Once that is done she is blindfolded and gagged and then the man she is with does something to her off-camera, after taking his upthrust foot in his hand. We cut to a close up of Nikaido’s face as the blindfold and gag are taken away from her and we see her glazed and possibly uncomprehending expression as the shot is held and she discovers the reality of her situation, which is...

Okay, this is where it gets kinda strange as far as I’m concerned because the film then cuts to the opening credits sequence of Ai travelling the Tokyo streets. Since the tension created so skillfully in that first sequence was ratcheted up to an almost unbearable level, my immediate reaction to this was... oh, okay, so the rest of the film must be in flashback leading up to this moment and they’re going to reveal what happened at the end of the picture. Which is one of the main things that kept me interested in the film, to be honest.

Okay... I’ll come back to this a little later.

The shots of Ai travelling the streets of Tokyo at night in this are little visual gems of clinical menace, it has to be said. Everything seems blue lit and claustrophobic, the camera taking in the panorama as Ai silently observes the oppressive urban culture around her. It actually got me thinking, as I was watching, of the early cinema of David Cronenberg in the way it evokes a blue and washed out sense of hopelessness and, I have to say, that whatever else you might conclude about this film, you’d have to admit that it is, at least, deeply expressionistic in places.

For the rest of the film we follow little episodes of Ai’s daily life, mostly her encounters with various BDSM clients and I can only assume that each little vignette is culled from a different short story in Murakami’s source book. A really charming starting story, however, has Ai visiting a fortune teller who tells her she must do three things to avoid harm. 1. Place a telephone book under her television set, 2. Avoid any art galleries in the East and 3. Buy a pink, precious stone and have it made into a ring which she must wear on her middle finger. Of course, this scene is useful in two ways... primarily as an indication of Ai’s superstitious and wide-eyed innocent nature but, secondly, as a small plot device to almost get her into trouble when she goes back to a hotel room after leaving it behind... following an encounter with a particularly taxing and stern client and his girlfriend.

Actually, there’s a wonderful shot in this long sequence with her first post-credits client. She is on all fours in front of a mirror with a vibrator tied between her legs and her client is plunging in and out of his girlfriend, who is in a similar position behind Ai, playing with her as he does this. However, the reflection on the mirror is angled perfectly so that the client’s girlfriend is hidden by certain foreground elements and so, while we see this on our side of the mirror, the reflection makes it look like the gentleman in question is fucking Ai himself... which is a pretty impressive bit of camerawork, as far as I’m concerned.

The film is quite tame in its pervery, for the most part, but the way it's shot and the protracted nature of the sequences, much without dialogue, gives it a certain dark weight in places that you wouldn’t expect from this particular aspect of the modern BDSM scene. A lot of the shots are static set ups which also give it a more voyeuristic feel in certain scenes, although this is not an exclusive set of artistic decisions and there are plenty of shots where the camera roams a bit more freely. There’s also a lightness to certain sequences too, including a scene where Ai and another woman are doing a double domme session with a guy who likes to be strangled and they think they have accidentally killed him... until he regains consciousness and scares them both.

There’s a big tour-de-force acting sequence near the end of the movie where Miho Nikaido’s character takes a pill that a rich dominatrix gifts to her to give her Dutch courage as she goes through the streets under the influence of the drug, bottle in hand, and searches around for the address of her ex-celebrity boyfriend. Nikaido is pretty amazing in this, as she always is, and the whole sequence kind of reminded me, a little, of a kind of modernistic turning point in her life, similar to the less volatile but probably more potent ‘man with a sack’ sequence from Fellini’s excellent movie Nights Of Cabiria (reviewed here). It’s an interesting part of the narrative to end on and, frankly, the fact that the film does end on this sequence is what annoys me the most about this film...

At no time do we return to the truly powerful opening scene of the movie. Was this scene in Ai’s future or past? We don’t know. Do we know what her client did to her? We do not. It doesn’t come up again and I found this almost artistically criminal, in some ways, that the writer/director never returns to bring closure on this powerful opening set up. I could understand it if he’d given us a reminder of the scene and then refused to disclose what actually happened... that would have been a valid aesthetic choice and I could respect it. Here, though, we are just distracted away from the memory of the sequence all the way through the film and, in the end, it just wanders off into the closing credits. Very disappointing, as far as I’m concerned.

Ultimately, for all its good acting by the lead protagonist and some interesting shot designs and slick atmospheres evoked by the director, I wouldn’t be prepared to recommend Tokyo Decadence to a friend. It’s not something I feel I could revisit anytime soon but I am, at least, glad that I saw it. Another good thing is that it at least treats the BDSM scene in a, mostly, respectable fashion so there’s that but... no, not nearly as entertaining enough as indulging in the real thing. Maybe give this one a miss and use the cash you save to try something new instead.

Elles

Elles A’ Poppin’

Elles
France/Poland/Germany 2011
Directed by Malgorzata Szumowska
Artificial Eye Blu Ray Zone B

Elles is another movie I acquired as a blind buy because a) it was very cheap on Blu Ray in Fopp and b) it had a striking image of Juliette Binoche on the front cover. Binoche is an actress whose cinematic presence I first became acquainted with on an “after college trip” to the ODEON cinema in Shaftsbury Avenue, London, back in 1988 to see Philip Kaufman’s marvellous adaptation of Milan Kundera’s great novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It was in that screening that I fell in love with both the young Binoche and her female co-star in the movie, Lena Olin. I’ve been following her work, casually, on and off over the intervening years but, for me, she is one of the all-time great French actresses and so a quick read of the back cover convinced me to pick this one up off the shelf and bring it back home with me.

In the film, Juliette plays Anne, a working wife and mother, who is writing an article for ELLE magazine on the subject of student prostitution. She is aided in this by a series of interviews with two specific, young prostitutes - Charlotte, played by Anaïs Demoustier and Alicja, played by Joanna Kulig - and the movie is a collection of scenes from a regular day or two of Anna coping with juggling work, a dinner party for her husband’s boss and her problematic relationship with her two sons, while at the same time interspersing the incidents that make up her days with both extracts from the interviews with the two girls in various locations and, more so, flashbacks to the actual encounters and lives the girls lead... all presented cross cut in a, slightly, non-linear fashion, although all the three types of footage being cross cut are sliced into segments which run linearly in their own chronology, if that makes sense. So you have five different timelines - Anna, Anna interviewing Charlotte, Charlotte’s life as a working girl, Alicja and Alicja’s life as a working girl - all crosscut with each other but still running in order in terms of their footage in relation to themselves.

It must have been an absolute nightmare to edit but... at no time are you ever really confused in the ‘narrative structure’ (and I use that term very loosely) of the piece and it all makes sense and fits together beautifully well. Which is amazing considering that the way in which various shots are taken are also quite different. For instance, a well staged shot following a smooth and fluid pan will be pitched straight against a more naturalistic, hand held style of camera work within the same segment. Furthermore... some of those long, smooth camera shots will get to a point in a scene, to reach a particularly beautiful composition, and then suddenly there will then be camera movement on a small reaction to something a character has done, like Anna taking a pace or two backward within a master shot and the camera will just be rearranged slightly to bring her back into the centre of the frame. Which is marvellous and, I would have thought, incredibly difficult to make work with all the different styles of shot being sewn together in the editing to make something so completely understandable... but it does it so well.

Scenes are quite confidently mixed and matched: flashbacks to Binoche and her subjects in the past while simultaneously seeing the story line of each of the girls as it progresses on a parallel to Binoche and independent of her, creating an ambience of mood which, again despite the shuffling around, doesn’t lose the emotional veracity of the piece or dilute its rendition due to the bouncing back and forth between shot content. The director magnificently coaxes the audience into accepting the overall flow of the piece, independent to the format of the content, without imposing any judgement on, or desire for, a more linear narrative flow.

Another thing the director seems to be doing quite often in this, and it’s quite possibly not a conscious thing but just an accidental occurrence, is to contrast scenes comprising of long shots with others in extreme close up... it’s quite refreshing that the director is not afraid to get right in the face of her actresses and actors in this film. Again, despite the two very different levels of intimacy achieved by the distance of the camera to her subjects, she seems to make it all work pretty well.

In terms of content, I’m pleased to say that the writer and director of this presents the two prostitutes as intelligent and emotional beings. It doesn’t make any judgement on their chosen profession and this is a good thing. As the narrative goes on it becomes clear that Anna’s original, cynical stance on the pitfalls and rewards of the girl’s chosen routes becomes more accepting and she begins to see them as friends and feels something of a void in her own life in comparison... at least that’s the way I saw things and, like many films, it’s open and resilient enough to handle a certain amount of interpretation. The two girl’s lifestyles are seen as not without danger but certainly as something which entails more freedom and ownership than Anna’s current home situation... which is a good view to take. It also has some telling details of the truth of the working practicalities of the girl’s lives. For instance, having two phones - one for clients and one for personal calls. I used to know a sex worker... not a prostitute actually but, in most ways, she did a job that certainly qualifies as sex work... and she apparently used the same kind of arrangement with her phones... so that struck me as a nice truism.

While the film is showing both the pros and cons of being a pro, and not making any real judgements from the audience in terms of pitching the content of the girls at any rate (the trajectory of Juliet Binoche’s character is, as I mentioned earlier, a little different in emotional tone) it doesn’t shy away from showing the graphic sexual content one might associate with the chosen profession of Charlotte and Alicja... which can only be a good thing and is a gutsy move on part of the writer and director not to veer away from what might be, to some, fairly challenging imagery in certain sequences. I was a little bemused at one point because the film, fairly early on in the narrative, shows one of the girls receiving a golden shower... and that’s something I believe is deemed uncertifiable by the BBFC in UK releases of movies, be it at the cinema or on home viewing. However, it’s definitely in here and so I’m wondering how this release got away with it, frankly. Certainly not complaining, but wondering how on earth Artificial Eye were allowed to include that content in their release with no intervention by our horrible censors. A neat trick, no doubt.

And so we have a film where the boldness of the content is not let down by either the acting - everybody, including Binoche of course, is absolutely awesome - and nor does the mise en scene and the editing let it down either. In fact, it gets quite dazzling on both fronts.

At one point, for instance, there’s a brilliant sequence where the director upends our perceptions of what we are seeing by the way the tone of two scenes involving one character’s interactions are presented in the edit. We think one of the girls is with her regular boyfriend, because the relationship between the two is so respectful and loving... and later we find that he is just another paying customer. In contrast, we are immediately given a scene of her with her 'real' boyfriend, which is the less easy going of the two relationships by far. It soon becomes clear that he doesn't know how she earns her money... which strikes me as another truism for a certain portion of sex workers, I suspect.

Another great piece of cinematic revelation comes in the form of a transformation scene around a dining table near the end of the movie and the culmination of both the dinner party Anna has had to prepare for and the current fragility of her emotional state. Here, the slow pan round of the camera circling the table allows the director to progressively and surreptitiously replace the people at the table with the actors who played the various girl's clients. Also, as we refamiliarise ourselves with the faces of the actors once they have transformed back to the real guests, it becomes clear that one of the guests is, indeed, one of the girl’s real life clients. Juliette Binoche, in her mind, is joining in with the music provided by one of the “clients” nakedly strumming a guitar and singing, until a cut takes us back into a view of Binoche as she really is... looking ghastly deadpan and without any of the joy of what has been going in her head showing externally. It’s a brilliant scene and a striking piece of performance from Binoche... but, of course, I’ve come to expect nothing less from this remarkable actress. The scene makes an obvious metaphor, perhaps, by using the art of the reveal to bring home the basic truths to an audience about the commonality of both the clientele and the girls they go to see, by holding up a mirror and showing us that neither is out of the ordinary and it could be any one of us or our close circle of friends in a similar situation. Again, though, it’s done without any form of judgmental tone from behind the camera... here the conclusions of the revelation are judged only by Anna herself and her reaction to her lapsed state of reality at this point. Which is just as it should be.

Elles is, I have to say, one of my better blind buys. If you can’t tell by the above coverage, I really enjoyed this one and am looking forward to revisiting it again at some point in the future, not to mention seeking out other movies directed by Malgorzata Szumowska somewhere down the line. A truly remarkable experience in modern cinema and something no cinephile should miss out on. I fully recommend this one to anyone into the beauty of the art... don’t let this one get away from you.

Jeune & Jolie

Jolie Good!

Jeune & Jolie 
2013 France
Directed by François Ozon
Just about still playing at cinemas in the UK if you’re quick.

I always find director Françoise Ozon a little hit and miss, truth be told. But even when it’s a bit of a miss, I still tend to appreciate his stuff, on the rare occasions it’s actually advertised enough that I’ll get to hear about it before it passes me by at the cinema. I nearly missed this one and I’m angry that my local Cineworld didn’t bother showing it when it was released back in November. They’re getting worse and worse at showing anything much other than US blockbuster type movies these days.

I didn’t really want to brave a trip out on 27th December to go to London and pay loads more money than I normally would to see a film, to be honest, but I figured if this one was good enough it might make my best movies of 2013 list and I see so few contemporary foreign films nowadays that I really wanted to take in something different to my usual escapist fodder... I was much better at the whole World Cinema scene when I was a student, to be sure.

Now that I’ve done so, I’d have to say that Jeune & Jolie is a pretty good movie. It’s not exactly what I’d classify as a hit or a miss, by my standards anyway. It sits there somewhere in between but it carries itself well with its paired down sense of what a story is and isn’t and, like a small poem where you have to concentrate and look harder because the minimal trickle of words entices you into thinking there’s something more in there that requires your attention, the film holds you in its grip over its short running time and it doesn’t get boring at any point.

This one centres on a 17 year old girl’s decision to become a prostitute and Ozon’s lens takes a chance to almost glamourise the lead actress with his voyeuristic way of framing her and concentrating on her physical beauty and the expression of her contemplation of her life, without sensationalising it or exploiting it in the overtly sexual way that many directors might do, either as a strategy or subconsciously.

The really big thing for me about this film is the ambivalence inherent within the camera eye’s stance in making a value call on the main protagonist Isabelle’s career path as a sex worker and the unwillingness of both her character and the film to depict this as either a positive or a negative. What the film does do, however, is point out both the innefectiveness and the hypocrisy of those standing in judgement around the central lead’s “part-time activities”... and this is something I really value. It’s refreshing to find a central character who’s a sex worker but not one trying to justify her own decisions and if some may see Isabelle as something of an emotional cypher, I think that’s a pretty good call.

Personally, I think, since their seems to be no real financial motivation to the character, who keeps the huge amounts of money she makes hidden away from her parents... unspent, that she enjoys something of the life she has made for herself away from her family, to the point where the sexuality becomes something of an addiction (like sex usually does become to most people) and I think it’s pertinent that the character, when she is found out due to one of the negative aspects of her job colliding with the outside world in the form of the police, keeps her old mobile sim card with all her client numbers and contacts for use at a point when she has run the gauntlet of counselling and family misunderstanding. She obviously had every intention of returning to her life of prostitution when all the fuss has died down.

There are two key points in the film which I think are good Rosetta Stone moments when it comes to decoding the character of Isabelle. One is when Charlotte Rampling, playing the widow of one of Isabelle’s regular clients, hires her to understand and almost relive her husband’s final liaison. It’s telling that Isabelle at first mistakes this gesture as a sexual encounter and is willing to jump in there and service the former wife to her former best client. The character is 17 and so is perhaps inexperienced enough at life to be anything other than willing to decode the liaison as a prospect rather than a mental autopsy... or is it that she’s actually a lot more confident than that?

The second of my key moments may shift towards the latter when Isabelle discovers the possibility that her mother might be having an affair. She doesn’t use this as much of a threat but more as a leveller to point out to her mother, and the audience, that she is being judged by standards which are unfairly being applied to her from an outside that clearly has no grasp of her personal confidence as a person to make the kinds of decisions about her life that she wants to. At least that’s the way I read it and I think it’s this confidence to a character who tends to give nothing away throughout the film’s running time (even a scene where she breaks down crying is perhaps best seen as a release of tension combined with survival strategy as opposed to a more pitched reaction) that really cements this film as something a little more stand out than the way it could easily have been moulded by another director.

The camera work is quite beautiful and mixes sweeping movement with curiously static and repetitive establishing shots which lend the piece a certain sense of visual anchoring... which is a nice touch. The performances are all pretty convincing and interesting too. The 1970s fly-on-the-wall approach to the material, despite an abundance in some places of camera motion, allows these performances to shine through in the way they need to in order to pull the audience in and encourage suspension of disbelief.

My one real problem with the movie was the music strategy. The film has hardly anything in it that I noticed at all for the first half, apart from some songs used in a non-diegetic manner. This is an okay choice but then there is musical scoring later on in the film and, while this is a perfectly valid tactic of ratcheting things up to a certain level or changing the tone at some point during a film (Jerry Goldsmith’s score for Coma, for example, exists pretty much in only the last 45 or so minutes of the movie) I felt the scoring here was too thin and not quite up to the task whereas, the soundscape of the earlier sequences without music were already creating a certain audio intensity without needing to throw music in as well... and since I love movie scores it really hurts me to say that.

That minor criticism aside, though, Jeune & Jolie is a pretty good movie if you fancy seeing something French which deals with adult themes (although some of the characters themselves don’t respond in much of an adult manner in some sequences within the film). It’s not one I’d go out of my way to watch again but, certainly, it’s not one I’d run to avoid seeing again if the opportunity arose and it may, you never know, make my years best new release list. I’’m not sure yet but you can find out about that one in a few days, methinks. The film is certainly worth a peek, though, if you feel like a trip to the cinema.