Goodbye Emmanuelle

The Goodbye Gal

Goodbye Emmanuelle
aka Emmanuelle 3
Directed by François Leterrier
France 1976
Severin Films Blu Ray

Warning: Some end of movie spoilers here.

Goodbye Emmanuelle is a bit of an outlier in terms of the original Emmanuelle trilogy (if you choose to group them like that… and many people do). Perhaps the giveaway is in the opening credits where it states it’s based on the character Emmanuelle rather than actually taking any of Emmanuelle Arsan’s books as a source inspiration. That would certainly explain a couple of things.

Two big things which make this stick out like a sore thumb, plus one aside about the trilogy of films’ ‘supposed’ status of softcore pornography (they’re not but then I’m loathe to pigeonhole anything under the ridiculous  label ‘art film’ either). 

One is... it’s structured like a more mainstream movie, which I’ll expand on in just a second and the other is that, despite not being based on one of Arsan’s novels, it actually, for the first third of the film, upholds the original writer and her husband’s ideologies of an open marriage with no jealousy. More so, I think, than the first two movies did. However, the rest of the movie does go on to completely betray that open spirit, it seems to me and, I suspect Arsan herself would not have been happy with the direction this movie takes.

Once again, Emmanuelle is played both sensitively and intelligently as a somewhat more naive character, it seemed to me, by the great Sylvia Kristel. And Umberto Orsini returns from the previous film as her husband Jean.

Okay, so the film actually has a storyline of sorts, dealing with Emmanuelle’s pursuit of a film director, played by Jean-Pierre Bouvierre (Kristel’s soon to be real life romantic partner Ian McShane failed the audition for this part because he couldn’t speak fluent French, it would seem), who is scouting locations in her neighbourhood. When they get it on, leading to a temporary rejection of her by this new guy, Jean becomes uncharacteristically jealous and it all ultimately leads to he and Emmanuelle splitting up at the end and her leaving the country, in pursuit of this new guy. Which, as I said, completely fails the tenets of both her characters’ and the original author’s (or authors’, depending on what you believe) philosophies on love and eroticism.

Now, the thing about the structure of the movie is that, while it has a few erotic episodes… with even less sex than the previous instalments… it’s not as episodic in feel to the previous two movies, nor indeed, the novels those movies purported to be adapting. So it’s not as loose and even the acting is more ensemble in nature than those previous two (almost as if someone had asked Robert Altman to direct an Emmanuelle movie).

There’s even a metaphor at one point, when an old man tells Emmanuelle and her latest lover a story about his wife getting eaten in front of him by a shark. It turns out not to be true and a story the guy tells because he can’t face the fact his wife ran off with another guy but, I think by this point in the film it’s more a comment of the rocky marriage of Emmanuelle and Jean in a metaphorical way, more than anything else.

The sex scenes are much more expressionistic impressions than even the previous two (which were similar but not quite as brief as these ones) but they do at least punctuate the film at regular intervals as though one of the producers, who was about to become mayor (or much higher I believe) wanted to maintain the impression that it’s still an erotic movie of sorts, without wanting to offend his voters.

Another thing is that the ensemble scenes and the noisy ‘gathering’ scenes (where Kristel performs a cute but overly long dance) have the effect of imbuing the long, quieter sequences with the impression of it being a much more reflective film than it, perhaps, actually is.

Also... different times. When Emmanuelle beds her maid at the start of the film (with her husband arriving home and joining in half way through), she has to make up a ridiculous story for her to tell the woman’s waiting husband because of his jealousy. Later on, the same housemaid has a big black eye because her husband caught her sitting on another man’s lap. But nothing in the dialogue or acting seems to express that he was wrong to hit his wife and… yeah.. like I said, different times.

The saving grace of the film (and that’s not Serge Gainsbourg’s score and his dodgy title song) is the absolutely beautiful cinematography, which matches the previous movie for sheer beauty… and of course, a fair few shots of the beautiful body of the lead actress… she seems to be very photogenic, for sure. But that’s about it for me and the movie Goodbye Emmanuelle. The film ends with a long held note of melancholy and its sad to see Sylvia’s ‘almost swan song’ - she would return briefly for the fourth to have her appearance somehow magically altered at the start by plastic surgery into a much younger actress* - in the role see her go out on such a sad note, almost of betrayal (I’m siding with Jean in this one) but there it is. It’s still an enjoyable watch though and in some ways does still feel like it belongs with the previous two, to an extent.

* I’m not quite ready to open the can of worms of Sylvia returning to the TV movies of Emmanuelle decades later... but I have looked up their availability, for sure.

 

EMMANUELLE ARSAN AT NUTS4R2

Novels
Emmanuelle
Emmanuelle L’Anti-Vierge
Laure

Movies
The Sand Pebbles 
I, Emmanuelle
Emmanuelle (1974)
Emmanuelle 2 
Good Bye Emmanuelle
Laure
Emmanuelle (2024)

Saga Erotica - The Emmanuelle Collection 

Emmanuelle 2 - L’Anti-Vierge

 

Boat Full of Sea Men

Emmanuelle 2
Aka Emmanuelle L’anti-vierge
Directed by Francis Giacobetti
France 1975
Severin Films Blu Ray

Trigger warning: Taboo and illegal practices discussed and sometimes condemned. 

Okay, so I enjoyed Emmanuelle 2 a little more than the first movie in the series (reviewed here). That being said, it doesn’t really play with your expectations much in that it’s more in line with what I’d expect from a soft core erotic movie of the time and, I’m sure this is probably more the film that many audiences were expecting the first film to be.

That being said, for this audience member it certainly set up unrealistic expectations because its proper French title on the print is Emmanuelle L’anti-vierge and claims to be based on that book by Emmanuelle Arsan. However, having already read that book in preparation for watching this movie (you can read my review here), I’d have to say that very little of that book works itself into the ecosystem of the film adaptation. More on that a little later.

The plot, or anti-plot in this case, since it’s almost a reboot of the previous film and it’s practically non-existent, starts with Emmanuelle getting on a boat full of sea men and then travelling on a ship, in a dormitory with a load of tempting women, to be reunited with her diplomat husband Jean, who has been away on business for a couple of months. Then, with their ‘open marriage’, the film becomes a series of sexual encounters between the two of them and various lovers.

Sylvia Kristel reprises her role as a somewhat more intelligent (it seemed to me) iteration of the character (she seems to have lost the naivete of her book incarnation to some extent here) but, this time round, her husband is played by Umberto Orsini… who seems much more likeable.

The film has fantastic cinematography and every location, with slow fluid camerawork which seems to explore the environments in order to ‘find’ the characters, looks absolutely beautiful. Needless to say (or needles to say, if commenting on the ‘sexy acupuncture’ sequence) this also goes for the sex scenes and all the actors come off well in these.

Highlights for me would be that somewhat silly but fleshly decorative acupuncture sequence, a slight scene where Emmanuelle sexes up a tattooed guy in the changing rooms of the local polo club and their sounds are expertly mingled with the sound of the match outside and the panting horses… and a six way massage scene where the two take their friend Anna-Maria (played by Catherine Rivet) to a parlour where they are laid out on three tables and given erotic, body to body massages by three women simultaneously.

And here’s the thing about that last scene I talked about. The saucy masseur who sexes up Anna-Maria is an early appearance by none other than the great Laura Gemser, who would of course begin her long, iconic run as Italy’s Black Emanuelle (with one M only, for copyright reasons) the same year.

One other scene of note is when Emmanuelle is looking through some kind of cine-viewfinder while someone takes her from behind and the BDSM, double penetration, strap-on cartoon she is watching is intercut into the sequence. I love it when live action films present prominent animated scenes as part of their make up (it’s a pretty neat cartoon actually).

Okay… so there are some problems too. A prominent character from the first book, Christopher, makes it into this movie in some scenes from that book, kinda. Anna-Maria is more baffling because she’s treated here as a completely new character, played by a different actress to the pseudo-iteration of her in the first film (who had a slightly changed character name too, if memory serves). So that’s confusing.

And a big long monologue from Jean to that character in the second book is chopped up and interspersed through three scenes, with some overlaps to other characters and versions of those sentiments from the first book. Which is actually a better way of doing it in terms of the pacing within a cinematic context, I would say.

So most of the book is gone, including some really interesting scenes, characters and locales and, I have to wonder why, since the second book seems to have many more opportunities for cinematic opulence which have all been ignored here. Certainly, Emmanuelle Arsan’s philosophy of giving oneself to anyone regardless of your own desire is not adhered to or raised here. The only moment where there is a trace of her and her husband’s outlook on life regarding that particular aspect seems to be that, after making love to three sailors (not at a prince’s party with many sailors, as in the book) in a brothel called the Jade Garden (which, again, is nothing like the secret glass palace which serves a more intense version of it in the book), she at least takes money for her services. So that, at least, is an echo of boring character Mario’s ideas (and, fortunately, he doesn’t make a similar appearance in this movie at all).

As for the vile underage sex theme which somehow subtexts the novel, I’m pleased to say it’s been circumnavigated by this version completely. Emmanuelle and Jean do, indeed, deflower Anna-Maria towards the end of the movie (both together in this version of events) but it’s clearly stated here that she’s 18 years of age… and not five years younger as in the books.

All in all, although really a lot less interesting in terms of ideas found in the book it misleadingly purports to be an adaptation of, I found Emmanuelle - L’antivierge (or Emmanuelle 2 as it is more popularly marketed as, in many countries) to be a much lighter and entertaining picture than the first although, to be fair, it does also lack the substance and gravitas of the original Emmanuelle.

 

EMMANUELLE ARSAN AT NUTS4R2

Novels
Emmanuelle
Emmanuelle L’Anti-Vierge
Laure

Movies
The Sand Pebbles 
I, Emmanuelle
Emmanuelle (1974)
Emmanuelle 2 
Good Bye Emmanuelle
Laure
Emmanuelle (2024)

Saga Erotica - The Emmanuelle Collection 

Emmanuelle L’Anti-Vierge - the novel

Arsan Around

Emmanuelle L’Anti-Vierge
aka Further Experiences of Emmanuelle
aka Emmanuelle 2
By Emmanuelle Arsan 
Granada
ISBN 9780583125741

Trigger warning: Taboo and illegal practices discussed and sometimes condemned. 

“But the borderlines of my love aren’t identical with the frontiers of her flesh.”
Jean, Emmanuelle L’Anti-Vierge

Originally published in a clandestine edition in 1960, following on from the ‘official publication’ of the first novel in the series from the year before (and reviewed here), Emmanuelle L’Anti Vierge has a few different titles like Further Experiences Of Emmanuelle but, the title I have managed to get hold of is a British Granada paperback tying in with the name of the second movie, Emmanuelle 2. And, of course, the actual authorship of this volume is an enigma as to whether it was Arsan or her husband writing all these novels but, I suspect it was a collaborative arrangement. Much like the declared state of being by the main character and her husband as a combined, erotic creature and, one supposes, based on the real life experiences of the two who, as I mentioned in my review of the first tome, influenced Thai culture and brought about the swinging sex scene there. Although I now suspect something far more sinister was lurking underneath that but… yeah, not sure and, all I have to go on is the subject matter of these fictionalised exploits.

Now, I have to say that I think this sequel is infinitely better than the first novel. You may remember I talked about the ‘stops dead tonal shift’ when an excessively boring character called Mario dominates the last third of the book and pontificates about the duty and intricacies of a self sacrificing erotic pathway for humanity. Well, sad to say he’s back in this one and the first twenty pages or so are more of him and his boring philosophy. However, he happily leaves the narrative for most of the book and his further interruptions are nowhere near as tiresome and, although further elucidation and exploration of his philosophy are much invoked by various characters, it’s all mixed in with the sexual shenanigans one would expect from ‘an erotic novel’ and so the pill is significantly sweetened.

Now the ‘plot’ of the novel is very simple. Emmanuelle continues to explore different lovers of various gender (and multiples thereof) throughout the tale, as part of her ‘free marriage’ to Jean, while further exploring her path extending Mario’s original line of reasoning. So, yeah, it’s very simple, for sure, but there’s a lot of interesting and downright unusual stuff going on too.

For example, a prince gives a party where Emmanuelle is sexed up by many men (and women). Another scene at a fancy dress ball where she takes part in a happily obscene tableaux as one of many dressed as specific birds conjures up satisfyingly surreal images of something like Max Ernst’s Une Semaine De Bonté or the bird mask worn in the 1960s update of Judex. Or how about being anally taken by a buddhist monk who presents a golden dildo to her in return for services rendered by her to his religion.

Another thing which features heavily in a couple of chapters is a huge glass building with thick glass walls that don’t reveal what’s going on inside due to the sheer density of glass. It’s at a hidden location and can only be entered by driving to a secret, underground entrance and being raised into the ground floor of the building. This is basically a high class brothel with very specific rules where Emmanuelle plies her trade, once her character is taken with the idea that to be truly free, one must prostitute oneself to all and sundry. It’s here, in the only truly emotional high point of the novel, that Emmanuelle finally finds her ex lover Bee but, out of conscience, rejects her advances. It’s one of three powerful moments in the novel but the other two are decidedly strange…

And are as follows…

There’s one scene where Emmanuelle is coerced by a Dr. Marais (I couldn’t find any history on whoever his real life counterpart is) who is experimenting with a course of drugs that makes women easy to control and manipulated erotically. The book turns almost into a horror novel at this point but Emmanuelle says, after her first dosage and evening of debauchery, that she will not be back for another shot and… the book makes no mention of it in the following chapters and it’s all forgotten about, it seems. Until… until, much later in the book, a headline from a newspaper is read that Marais is wanted in connection with a police enquiry regarding a dead woman found his flat. I guess it was a lucky escape for Emmanuelle but, it makes almost a weird non-sequitur of a scene, to be honest.

But not as unusual a non-sequitur as the random scene which just appears out of the blue half way through a chapter, where two lovers, fleeing an authority and being chased by dogs, end up in their dishevelled state making love in a ditch. It seems completely divorced from the content and characters in any of the rest of the book and is a bit of a curio. I was expecting the other shoe to drop later on in the novel as it did with the murderous doctor but, no... no clue. The best way, then, to take it is that maybe it’s a metaphor for the pursuit and practice of Emmanuelle and Jean’s erotic principles but, if that is the case (and I’ve no reason to assume my best guess is right here) then maybe it would have been better relocated towards the end of the book when Jean and Emmanuelle are expounding those theories.

Now, I’d hoped the underage sex thing which permeated the sensibilities of the first novel would be happily absent from this second volume and, for the most part they are. But, when they do come they are much more blatant and I really don’t know why this vile spin is allowed to be published now, even in the wake of the court cases revolving around Lady Chatterly’s Lover, I think this kind of morally reprehensible stuff has no place in adult literature. However, Emmanuelle’s treatise at one point (though discarded by the main character soon after) includes ‘younger people‘ in it and, towards the end of the book, Emmanuelle ‘deflowers’ her best friend (before dripping sperm from her own mouth into her friend’s mouth after she is taken by three brothers on a beach). Nothing wrong in that per se but, you will probably at some point remember that her friend is only 13 years old in the previous novel and that this one is set six months later. So you can do the maths on that yourself!

However, this vile ingredient of the books aside, in general I enjoyed Emmanuelle L’Anti-Vierge quite a lot, with the obvious exceptions. At least now I can watch the second movie with somewhat of a critical eye to adaptation. So that’s next on my list.

 

EMMANUELLE ARSAN AT NUTS4R2

Novels
Emmanuelle
Emmanuelle L’Anti-Vierge
Laure

Movies
The Sand Pebbles 
I, Emmanuelle
Emmanuelle (1974)
Emmanuelle 2 
Good Bye Emmanuelle
Laure
Emmanuelle (2024)

Saga Erotica - The Emmanuelle Collection 

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.

Shining Sex

Sex Shooter

Shining Sex
Italy/France/Belgium/Switzerland 
1976 Directed by Jess Franco
Severin Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Warning: Kind of spoilers... I guess. It’s basically just sex.

Okay then... this is probably going to end up being a really short review. Shining Sex is a movie by Jess Franco I’d not heard of before. I do like the director a lot but find his films hit and miss... usually they hover between absolute masterpiece classics such as Vampyros Lesbos (reviewed here), She Killed In Ecstacy (reviewed here) and Female Vampire (reviewed here) to... almost unwatchable stuff like Nightmares Come At Night (reviewed here) or his not so great Fu Manchu films (reviewed here and here). Now, the only reason I bought this beautiful Severin restoration of Shining Sex is because there is also a CD in here presenting the first part of a compilation of cuts from Jess Franco soundtracks (many of which I don’t have on other CD compilations) so, yeah, even if I never watched the film it was still a good buy for me. 

However, I did watch the movie and... well... it really is just a sex movie to be honest. Nice to look at but it’s almost non-stop sex going between different locations and a surprisingly small amount of dialogue. It looks nice and if you want to see as much of Franco’s girlfriend (later wife) and second muse Lina Romany as it’s possible to capture on a camera which doesn’t actually enter a person’s body, then you’re in the right place. And she is fine in this.

The entire plot, as it is, will reveal everything here. Lina plays Cynthia, who works in a nightclub doing her special (not so special) strip show entitled Shining Sex. A strange couple pick her up after the act and she takes them back to her place to do sexy business. But it’s clear there is something strange up with them. The woman, Alpha (played by Evelyne Scott) is a bit unused to sex and a bit bitey. Her partner Andros (played by Raymond Hardy) doesn’t have much to offer in terms of sparkling conversation either. They sex up Cynthia and rub a special ointment on her which causes her body ecstacy but also turns her, unwittingly, into a killing machine (much like the lips of death kiss in one of Franco’s Fu Manchu movies). Alpha is really a being from another dimension and Andros her brain washed slave (in some readings he’s her robot... although his erect member seems less mechanical to be honest... I haven’t seen the French language edition of the film but it’s possible the term robot is used in the original sense of the word as ‘slave’?).  They send Cynthia out, using telepathic control signals, to kill humans who are onto the fact that there are beings from another dimension in our reality... to sex them up and kill them with the poison her body has absorbed. 

There’s also a bizarre sub plot with Jess Franco as Dr. Seward (presumably named after the one in Dracula) as he has a psychic connection with Alpha whenever Cynthia does sexing... or something... it’s all a bit loose. We see Cynthia sex a few people to death and then her body succumbs to the ravages of the ointment/virus thingy and she dies herself. The end... nothing more to see here folks. 

It looks nice and there are many trade mark Jess Franco zooms if that’s your kind of thing... lots of zooms in and out of Romay’s hairless labia and other such fleshy visions are on offer here. And the decor in some of the interiors is pretty cool and made me think of some of his earlier films. Not too much else to say about this one though, to be honest. The last 20 minute sequence takes place in Africa (or somewhere like it) and it really doesn’t need to. I know Franco shot this with the same cast in the same ten days that he also shot a movie called Midnight Party so, perhaps that movie called for an African sequence (or, as likely, since it’s Franco we’re talking about, perhaps he was also shooting bits for this while he was making a third movie in the same period). It doesn’t add or detract fro the plot, such as it is... just gives us a refreshing change of landscape at some point. 

Despite the lovely Lina and various actresses getting naked and frisky for the director, I found this... not a hard watch exactly but I did find myself almost dozing off in a couple of places. It’s more the extras to this wonderful Severin set which are the big draw. The score CD was always going to be the thing for me but there are some nice interviews on the second disc plus, again if this is your thing, almost a quarter of an hour of outtakes which didn’t make it into the movie... comprised totally of close ups of various vaginas as they are being licked or of cocks being similarly stimulated. Maybe this would make a good back drop, projected onto the wall at a party but, yeah, it’s all a bit samey, to be honest. 

That being said, it’s not a terrible film from a technical level and I’m genuinely pleased I saw it. I will continue to seek out another Franco here and there (I still have his House Of Lost Women to watch, which I bought for the inclusion of the second volume of the CD soundtrack compilations) but I would say that, unless you are a Franco completest (and that’s probably not a bad thing to be... although challenging because of the amount of movies he made and their current availability) then I would say Shining Sex is probably something you could live without, to be honest. 

Sex And Lucia

Penetration &
Interpenetration

Sex And Lucia
aka Lucía y el sexo
Spain/France 2001
Directed by Julio Medem
Palisades Tartan DVD Region 2

Warning: Look, to try and get this one
straight in my head as I review it, I think
it’s going to have to have some spoilers...
for which I apologise.

Sex And Lucia is one of those movies I managed to miss in the cinema when it came out back in 2001. Years later I found a DVD of the movie going as part of a ‘£3 when you buy something else’ offer in Fopp records and now, a few years after even that, I’ve finally caught up with the film, not realising I’m not entirely unfamiliar with this director’s work, actually... although, barring one other, I haven’t seen much else by this director since the 1990s.

The film sets things up with an uncomfortable telephone conversation between Lucia and her long term lover, a published but tormented writer, as she is trying to balance her waitressing job while fearing for his life through an act of suicide on the other end of the line. When she gets home she discovers him gone, a half heard phone call from the police confirms her suspicions that he is dead. Then she goes to an island that  he always loved, to come to terms with what’s happened but then starts to travel back in her mind to how she met him and we start to see a series of narratives around the writer, his fictionalised (or is it) account of the narratives and the various women in his life who weave in and out of the story.

The writer is Lorenzo, played by Tristán Ulloa. The four women... well, three women and one little girl... are Lucia (played by Paz Vega), Elena (played by Najwa Nimri), Belen (played by Elena Anaya... who I knew from Wonder Woman, reviewed here and this director’s own Room In Rome, reviewed here) and Lorenzo’s young daughter Luna (played by Silvia Llanos), who he only meets for the first time quite a while into the narrative.

The film is a beautiful example of different interpenetrating story lines, as each of the narratives which you are watching cross cut in the most bizarrely coincidental of ways until, by the end, you realise that even though most of them don’t know it until they’re at the finishing post, that everyone in the narrative is actually connected to each other as the story strands transcend the audience’s initial perceptions of how the time settings of each tale are playing out. It’s a deliberately chopped and fragmented look at the narrative and it must have been hard to keep everything working in this way... but it does work and the sense of things coming together one after the other is part of the charm of the film, it has to be said. This includes a massive perception switch near the end... a trick played on the audience which is heralded quite a few times as the structure of the writer’s account is discussed and, although I could kinda see it coming from a long way off as a result of that, it’s a nice moment because it helps the film find a resolution of sorts. It’s also, perhaps, saying that some narratives can retain an illusion of flexibility to head towards something which is not, entirely, unlike a Hollywood ending, it has to be said.

The film is beautifully shot and colour palettes sometimes offset each other (I suspect I’ll pick up an underlying design scheme matching the story structure on a second watch) with very early scenes, for example, favouring warm browns and reds which are immediately contrasted, when Lucia arrives at the island, with largely washed out blues and icy whites.

Another thing which makes this absolutely hypnotic is the amount of wonderful performances by all the key players. They all work together absolutely brilliantly and it all helps maintain the illusion of a story which feels like it could suddenly go in any direction with scenes of tragedy and devastating loss making strange but comfortable bed fellows with scenes of joy and laughter.

There’s also a fair amount of nudity and sex and I was kinda surprised that the DVD I bought is actually uncut, now I’ve seen it. It’s been given a standard 18 rating over here but some of the sexual content is usually only reserved for an R18 certificate (which means something is only allowed to be sold in a sex shop... unless that’s been changed recently but this is an old disc now). For example, the use of erect penises and things being done to them is rarely allowed in commercial cinema over here (I was originally going to call this review Writer’s Cock but then decided against it for... a couple of reasons). Apparently the original US release of this was censored by two minutes.

Perhaps my only real criticism of the film is the score by Alberto Iglesias. For some reason this just felt a little anemic next to events on screen and I felt the music distracted rather than served the drama in this case. It’s rare for me to say something that critical about a film score, to be honest, so... yeah, I must have really hated that aspect of the film, I guess.

All in all, though, I would certainly recommend Sex And Lucia to pretty much most ‘friends of film’, both to ardent cinephiles or semi-casual viewers like myself. There’s a lot to love about this movie and, honestly, Paz Vega is particularly cute as the character by whom we are introduced to the initial threads of the interwoven story components. Definitely check this one out if you get the opportunity.

what purpose did I serve in your life

 

 

 

No Eroteme Tome

what purpose did
i serve in your life
by Marie Calloway
Tyrant Books ISBN: 9780985023584

I’d never heard of this novel when I ordered it and even then, I had to find a cheap, second hand edition because this thing seems almost impossible to get now for a reasonable price, even though it was only first published 8 years ago and apparently “sent shockwaves through the publishing industry”. I found out about it by way of a death. Back in March, a guy I’d never heard of called Giancarlo DiTrapano died, aged 47. It was reported that he’d founded a publishing label called Tyrant Books which, again, I’d never heard of but was reported to handle literature that no other publishing companies wanted to touch. Ahhh... now that did sound up my street. So much so that I had a quick look through the titles his publishing company had handled and saw one which has a very striking and somewhat haunting photograph of the author on the cover... what purpose did I serve in your life by Marie Calloway.

The title had no question mark or upper case lettering... hmm, edgy? Or just pretentious. I wasn’t sure and, after having read this, I’m still not although there is often a healthy disregard for punctuation rules in the book and, although it annoys the heck out of me now (what have I become?) I used to be similar in the way I used to like to set text as a graphic designer in my early days, a quarter of a century or so ago, I can at least empathise with what is, like it or not, a conscious decision.

The thing is though, the book was supposed to account the authors sexual antics in an obscene and frank manner, by all accounts so, I figured that this one might be something to take a look at and can be my one (or who knows, possibly even my starting point) book put out by this publisher.

It arrived in a much larger format than a standard paperback and, it has to be said, does recount almost exclusively the sexual experiences of the writer. It’s not particularly erotic and the acts described within are really not all that shocking, unless you almost really want to be offended with whatever is in here, if it’s out of your comfort zone. I’m not sure why it sent those literary shock waves out though because, it doesn’t really look at anything that other books haven’t already explored, it seemed to me.

That’s not to say it doesn’t have value or points of interest though.

The book is split up in chapters with the first chapter, Portland, Oregon 2008, detailing how the writer lost her virginity (if that’s still a concept of something you can actually lose). It then goes on in chapters which are often tagged in parenthesis in the contents by Marie’s age at the time (either 21 or, in one case, 22) and details her sex work experiences, her sexually hooking up with various literary writers and also fans of her work (a lot of this book was previously published on line in blogs or magazines etc). One of the married writers, who she refers to only as Adrien Brody, was apparently recognisable to anyone who knew him and I believe this is another reason why the book was such a sensation when it came out. Although, why it seems to now be a footnote is something I can’t fathom or find out about yet.

I kind of empathised with the writer fairly early on because, when in London, she makes derogatory comments about the airhead conversations between groups of English schoolgirls and, well, I’m sure this is something we can all sympathise with, yeah? There’s also some nice chapters which are more about the way the text is presented rather than the actual message carried by the words. So big collages of multi-sized fonts on a page bringing scattered sentences and half statements or pictures from her phone with half legible writing covering them or even a presentation of various social media or chat posts.

There’s nothing new about breaking up the page in this manner of course. Even if you think back to the days of Blast magazine over 100 years ago and then forward on from there in various literary assaults, there has been a lot of typographic experimentation going on. However, it’s also not a common phenomena in modern day literature so it’s kinda refreshing or, I don’t know, maybe just relieving that this kind of word presentation is not yet dead. There was one section where I think the writer let herself down a little... not even in that particular section actually but, in a follow up on it.

To explain, one chapter is various black and white, not brilliantly reproduced pictures of the author with various, quite harsh and brutal criticisms of her work written over the tops of them. Quite often they are reversed out text and, occasionally, there will be areas of hard white on the photo but the text is still written in white so it disappears and becomes totally unreadable or even illegible in those areas. Similarly, a few of the photos have black type going over very dark areas to produce the same effect and I love the way that this is presented as both a ‘weight’ of negative criticism but also an erosion of it to express exactly how reductive, redundant and pointless it is. And just what the writer actually thinks of it...

I thought it kind of brave and ‘right on’ that portions of the text were left unreadable but, alas, one of the later chapters actually reproduces the text of those criticisms as is, as part of the main flow of the account so... yeah, it kinda felt like the artist that is Marie Calloway had a sudden worry about just leaving it in that form and went about undoing the wonderful obfuscation of the critical data she’d so boldly introduced in the earlier chapter. Oh well... we all have days where we doubt ourselves, I guess.

Still, this doesn’t detract from the fact that it’s a seemingly authentic account of someone who seems to be a little naive about certain things and somewhat less than confident in certain areas. Which I suspect is a complete fabrication since she’s managed to pursue and win both a publication and divided opinion which, by its existence, places her as someone who is at least thought of as a serious writer. Which is kinda cool.

This book has been called by some as an embodiment of the ‘great American novel’ but, yeah, I’m not so sure and I suspect that the fact it seems to almost have disappeared without trace maybe means it’s not quite got that status... although, having read the dictionary definition of what makes a great American novel, I can kinda see how some people might want to champion this as an example of one, just as I can see how other readers might be terrified if this work earned that reputation. Similarly, I’ve heard it said that this is a book from a strongly feminist viewpoint but, okay so I’m a guy and possibly not in the best position to judge but, it doesn’t seem to be all that feminist and neither does it seem to be whatever the opposite of that term is, to me. It just seems to be an honest account of a young person’s sexual, somewhat masochistic and often narcissistic experiences in the wild and... there’s not a great deal to be said about that.

And there’s not much I can add to that either. what purpose did I serve in your life is a breezy read which takes the reader on a sketchy tour of sexual ideas and writerly musings, written by a person who you possibly feel you need to protect from some of the harsh realities of the world and which, as a work, you may or may not have an affinity with. I really don’t want to judge it as anything other than that because a lot of my expectations of it were merely from the baggage I bring to this myself as a reader and I feel a book like this almost excludes itself from criticism by the phrasing and presentation of its content. Other people can do that and opinion seems divided. I would happily read another book by this gal but, well... there seems to be nothing out there so the one thing I would take away from this would be that this girl needs to write something else and get it published very soon, or people will stop taking notice.

Love

Noé Escape

Love
France/Belgium 2015
Directed by Gaspar Noé
Artificial Eye Blu Ray Zone B

Love is a movie which includes unsimulated sex scenes, directed by Gaspar Noé, who also directed a movie I quite liked called Enter The Void (reviewed here)... and one which I didn’t care for all that much called Irreversible. Whether I like his movies or not, though, I do quite like his style of direction and presentation and so I thought I’d give Love a go.

The film is one which kind of teases the viewer with the pretence of having a story to tell... one might say it even has a bit of a mystery at its heart... but it doesn’t actually concentrate on that mystery at all and neither, it seems, is the director interested in giving us any solutions or closure to the so called plot set up. Instead it uses this starting point to explore the past relationship between the film’s central protagonist Murphy (played by Karl Glusman) and his ex-girlfriend Electra (played her by Aomi Muyock) from the viewpoint of looking back on it from his present situation with his current girlfriend and their young son.

Now I’ve got nothing wrong with movies that use a hook as a starting point and give no closure to that hook. Anyone paying attention to my reviews will know that I don’t value story as a major ingredient in a film anyway. In fact, last year I reviewed Sasha Grey’s second novel, The Janus Chamber (right here) which does exactly the same thing and even has this kind of ‘anti-structure’ referenced and justified within the text of the book. So I’m all quite cool with that.

That being said, the film wasn’t that much of an intriguing or fun watch, it has to be said. I didn’t dislike it too much but then I wasn’t as intrigued as I had been by Enter The Void so... not greatly enthused about this one, in all honesty.

The film starts with a long held shot of Murphy and Electra naked in bed and playing with each other’s genitals. It’s a nicely composed shot and I’ve got absolutely nothing against films which use real sex in them (theatrically released or otherwise). As Electra masturbates Murphy’s penis, we hear Eric Satie on the soundtrack... either one of the Gymnopédies or Gnoissiennes. We then jump cut in time to the sound of Murphy’s phone as he lays in the same bed with his current gal on New Year’s Day. As things go on around him and we learn that the phone call was former girlfriend Electra’s mother trying to contact him (because Electra has disappeared off the face of the earth) we hear his internal monologue as a voice over on the soundtrack... something which continues throughout the movie.

The film then starts flashing backwards and forwards in time and space as we explore various ‘scenes’ from his relationship with Electra, learn how much Murphy feels he still really loves her and also hear of his disenchantment with his current lady and the domestic cage which his life has become. And, as we hear him talk to himself and constantly calling himself a ‘loser’, it doesn’t take long to figure out the truth about this character... he really is a ‘loser’. I’m sorry but I could work up absolutely no sympathy for this fellow at all, no matter how well performed all the leads in this are (including Murphy). I kept asking myself why anybody would want to hang out with this whiny and constantly hypocritical guy when they didn’t have to.

Asides from the naturalistic and often very good performances from all the key actors, the film is full of the long takes and fluid camerawork which we are now accustomed to within the cinema of Gaspar Noé. Also, asides from constant shout outs to the director himself in one guise or another (for example, Murphy’s son is called Gaspar), Murphy is also a budding director and that allows for a fair few visual and audio references to keep fans of cinema interested in this.

The lightning schemes are often quite ‘impressionistic’, for example and, during one sequence where Murphy is wandering the streets at night and sifting through all the puzzle pieces of Electra in his head, the colour and light combined with the figure he is cutting through the city (with his back to us, half the time) absolutely invoked the ghost of Travis Bickle in Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver. Which makes sense since, in the time period when he is with Electra, Murphy has a Taxi Driver poster in his apartment. It’s a shame the music on this particular sequence I’m thinking of doesn’t go the whole hog and uses Bernard Herrmann’s last ever movie score on the soundtrack too.

However, there are some quite nice and unexpected movie score references throughout the running time... such as when we see a sex scene depicting the inception of Murphy’s son and it’s scored with Gaslini & Goblin’s music from Dario Argento’s Profondo Rosso (aka Deep Red). There’s another surprising, musical choice when Murphy and Electra visit a swinger’s club (on the recommendation of a police officer who arrests Murphy at one point) and the whole orgiastic sequence is underscored with John Carpenter’s main theme from his film Assault On Precinct 13.

It’s nice little surprises like this... along with the director’s usual flair for unexpected spectacle such as a scene with a camera POV inside a character’s vagina, with Murphy’s penis thrusting towards camera before ejaculating into a swirly, kaleidoscopic image... which keep the audience interested in a film which has, after all, a truly unsympathetic central protagonist. Or the interesting way the director will sometimes mask the sides of a shot in darkness to focus into the centre of a composition. Little touches like these keep the film from being boring although, it has to be said, in terms of any real substance to the characters or follow through on their actions, it’s kinda light.

Love is not a film I’d necessarily recommend to many people as a jumping on point for Gaspar Noé but fans of this director will probably be okay with it. The UK, Artificial Eye Blu Ray also has a 3D print of it on the disc, if you have the facilities to take advantage of this at home.

Sin-A-Rama

Sleazy Riders

Sin-a-rama : Sleaze Sex Paperbacks of the Sixties (Expanded Edition)
by Astrid Daley-Douglas
Feral House Books
ISBN: 978-1627310284
A good friend of mine bought me Sin-A-Rama: Sleaze Sex Paperbacks of the Sixties on the occasion of my 50th birthday, earlier in the year. This enticing and immensely entertaining look at the landscape of, mostly softcore, sex fiction paperbacks of the mid-1950s to late 1960s is a subject I was completely unfamiliar with (no, really) and so I dived into this one with relish.

The book takes the form of a glossy art tome reproducing various covers from this vast field which are mini masterpieces of artwork based, mostly, on the idea of showing as much of a woman’s (or sometimes man’s) body in a painting as you can get away with but while concealing all the naughty bits due to censorship laws. It’s not just the cover art that gives the often hilarious charm to these pop culture classics, however... many of the mind blowingly silly titles are guaranteed to bring a smile to the face of any potential reader and one wonders if the target audience for these books at the time was reading these things with the knowing wink the writers obviously gave them or were treating them as more serious fare. 

The book starts off, the first 70 pages or so, as a series of articles by different authors which give an often ‘first hand’ account of the various goings on around the scene of the stable of writers and the different companies they wrote for (almost always under a pen name, as you ‘ll see in a minute), as well as the various executives behind the scenes and the amount of trouble they would get into for distributing this kind of, extremely lucrative at the time, literature. Not to mention the lengths agencies like the FBI would go to in order to try and get some kind of prosecution for distributing this stuff. It also has some nice information about the various aspects of the law at different times and shows how various legal developments, such as the big court case with Lady Chatterley’s Lover and various other things which sidetracked the US government (the emphasis on this book is once again on the American demographic), allowed a loosening on what could and couldn’t be gotten away with in terms of describing the various sex acts depicted and, often, condemned by the very people exploiting them in order to be seen to be taking the moral high ground in order to get these works through.

The first big shock for me was that the second of the accounts in this book is by famed science fiction writer Robert Silverberg. Why? Well, although he was already an established writer of fantastic science fiction at the time, the big sci-fi boom of the 1950s had passed and there were only two publishers who were really putting that kind of material out at the time. Hence he and, it turns out, a lot of other famous writers, were more than just dabbling in churning out absolutely loads of these novels for the various publishers under a variety of different pseudonyms.

Silverberg starts out with a sample of how a piece of purple prose would be written now, full of all the different terms for the various ‘activities’ going on. He then gives an example of the same act written as he wrote it in the flowery and implied language of these novels and it’s quite an entertaining example of the difference between then and now. He goes on to say he was leading a fairly good lifestyle at the time and the rates that he was being paid for these things kept him in the high life. It turns out he churned out 150 of these novels in the space of five years. Do the maths there and figure out how many of these things he was knocking out every month at a starting salary of $600 a novel (which eventually doubled, if I understood him correctly) and you’ll see the kind of ferocious pace he and his contemporaries in the field were writing at in what must have been seen as a fairly lucrative trade. And all the while still writing for other genres for different publishers... and still getting out to all the parties too. Nice work if you can get it.

And it seems like it was a similar situation for a load of these ‘high end’ writers working in this, technically, lower end of the profession. And I mean ‘high end’ writers. You had people like Harlan Ellison, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Donald F. Glut (remember his novelisation of The Empire Strikes Back in 1980?), Donald E. Westlake, Edward D. Wood Jr (yeah, the infamous director as played by Johnny Depp in the Tim Burton movie Ed Wood) and even Evan Hunter (his more familiar pen name would be Ed McBain, of course), to name but a few. All of them labouring diligently to ensure their latest opus would not fall under the legal category “utterly without redeeming social value”, so that the work couldn’t be banned. And all of them lit up with beautiful cover paintings and designs by great artists like Eric Stanton, Gene Bilbrew and Chet Collom.

And, of course, some of these writers and artists had just as interesting and sometimes tragic lives as the protagonists who populated their particularly charming brand of sleaze novels. And the book does have some very touching accounts of their lives by their friends of the time which are quite poignant in places.

After this quite large amount of text for the small number of pages it fills to the brim (in fairly small type), the remaining of the 328 pages in this tome are made up of reproductions, some of them full page, of the various covers that make up various subsections of differently themed sleaze for you to wade through. And it’s a very cheering read with some truly genius, sleazy titles and some really cringeworthy but somehow brilliant copy lines accompanying said titles.

Titles like Narco Nympho, Jazzman in Nude Town, The Couples On Venus Lane (“The neighbourhood was like one big swappy family”), Flip Flop Swap, Sexus Suburbia (“Her motto was 'love thy neighbour'!”), Sinburbia, Flesh Therapist, Sahara Sin Den, Nude In Orbit, Caper At Canaveral, Those Sexy Saucer People, Twisted Tulips, Pit Stop Nympho, Sin Seance and Carnal Countess (“Wanton Mistress of a Neo-Facist Passion-Cult!”). And the whole gamut of possible porn variations are covered such as wife swapping, lesbianism, homosexuality, occult themed porn, corporate sector porn, fetishism, science fiction porn and so on.

There are also, scattered throughout, little samples of a paragraph or two of ‘juicy’ text pulled from the pages of some of these scintillating classics. My favourite, for example, was this moment from ‘hippie porn’ themed novel Light Up by Jon Parker (or whatever his real name might have been)...

"Her enormous breasts plopped free, then came to a dizzy bounce, pointing forward. Already, her nipples were as rigid as red crayons; moist crevices with droplets of scented perspiration dominated the enormity of the twin globes. The nipples were like bright red strawberries, capping the milky white breasts."

Yep, I’ve read stuff like that before and it doesn’t make it any less entertaining, that’s for sure.

And that’s about all I’ve got to say about this immensely fun and truly enlightening/educational read about the various novels in question and the environmental conditions which gave rise to them. At the back there are two kinds of indexes where you can find out some of the writers behind the pen names they used plus an attempt at a listing of all the various publishing companies putting this stuff out. This is, I have to say, a truly eye opening book for me and a real gem to have on the bookcase along with such treasures as the Grady Hendrix book Paperbacks From Hell (which I recently reviewed here). If you’re interested in this kind of stuff then Sin-a-rama : Sleaze Sex Paperbacks of the Sixties is, indeed, a quality read. Don’t pass this one by.

Viva

Leave It To Viva

Viva
USA 2007
Directed by Anna Biller
Anna Biller Productions/Shameless DVD Region 2

It’s really interesting seeing what is, effectively, Anna Biller’s first full length feature only a few weeks after seeing her second, The Love Witch (reviewed here), because I can now pick up on the tremendous similarities between the two and, temporarily at least, assign director signature traits to her (woohoo!). It also means she pretty much demonstrates, through her various artistic choices which follow through in both films, that she’s very much an ‘auteur’ director in the sense of captaining her specific celluloid ships through the same route. If you see what I mean.

Like The Love Witch, Viva uses a slightly surreal, ‘on the surface’, over the top acting style which I personally associate with American TV sitcoms from the 1950s - 1970s. It’s more overtly signposted within the text here, to a certain extent, due to the fact that Biller seems to be trying her best to make an early to mid-1970s US sexploitation picture and, although the highly comical acting method demonstrated in Viva (and in The Love Witch, for that matter) is certainly not endemic to that genre (although obviously some movies, like Doris Wishman’s films, use it almost by default in terms of the talent of the actors and actresses available), it’s at least ‘of the time’. Biller seems, to me, a little more subversive in that, while she is, after all, very definitely making an exploitation movie - this one has tons of nudity including Biller herself as lead character Barbie/Viva - she seems, at least to me, to be very much expressing it in the same way that an episode of The Brady Bunch or Bewitched might try and portray it. Which is... you know... kinda interesting and certainly makes for the cinematic equivalent of a page turner, in this case.

The opening follows Biller’s character Barbie from the bath where she’s reading a magazine and drinking before she vacates said vessel to get made up and dressed. Roaring off in her red, open top car which, since this is an Anna Biller movie, matches the same shade as the outfit she is wearing. And, that’s another stylistic tag which I’m going to lumber Biller with here... the exceptionally groovy colour palette she uses matches what she did nine years later in The Love Witch in that everybody’s outfits seem designed to either perfectly match to, or contrast against, the decor of the set they are seen in. For example, in one scene where Barbie and her husband are visiting her best friends, Sheila and her husband - two perfect nuclear families with cracks hidden beneath their ‘beautiful people’ surface - one guy is wearing a green top and the other guy is wearing a white shirt but with trousers which match the exact shade of green of the first guy’s top. It’s pretty nice stuff and, although one might say she’s taking a page out of the era in which she’s set this film... Los Angeles 1972... that certainly doesn’t hold for The Love Witch and I think it says more about the director’s impeccable taste when it comes to pulling all the details and colours of the mise en scène together in the most exquisite way. I’m telling you right now people... I’d love to see this woman make an Italian giallo.

She also, like in her later film, uses the decor to express the motivations of her characters... often through the use of paintings which make overt their attitudes towards certain issues. It’s not an uncommon modus operandi but it’s a nice touch and I’ll add that quirk to my ever growing list of Anna Biller signature marks, if I may (at least until she grows in a different direction, as most directors do).

The scene following on from the opening where Sheila and her husband talk about Playboy and drink an alcoholic breakfast ends up with Sheila about to strip down so her good, wholesome husband can take ‘artistic’ shots of her... seems more like a porn movie but it’s incredibly heightened, with lots of fake laughter by all the actors who perform their roles wonderfully (including Biller herself), before Barbie turns up and then both girls strip off for the ‘arty photos’. Biller seems both inspired by Playboy in this movie while similarly poking fun at the people who read it (Shelia proclaims, at one point, that old chestnut “I only read it for the articles...”). It’s a brilliant little parody of the kind of ‘soft porn logic’ combined with deliberately ‘bad acting’ which really nails and telegraphs the mood Biller is going for in a very quick way. She even goes so far as to deliberately mis-match shots to create little continuity errors between them to further authenticate the delivery of her agenda. At least... I assume it was deliberate?

Of course, one of the things which this is doing, in a film inhabited by generally stupid characters, male and female, is to show the sexism and attitudes of either sex in a repressive social set up. You have the guys getting together to talk about their latest technological equipment like their new stereo or TV (actually... that doesn’t sound too different to where we are now, to be honest) and the ladies getting together for conversations which, quite frankly, don’t just fail the Bechdel test but defy it in the most spectacular fashion. One husband, for example, sits patiently for his wife to give him his pipe and light it for him. Now, I grew up in the 1970s so it’s probably harder for me to identify where these common occurrences of everyday sexism (at least as it is perceived these days) begin and end but Biller makes it crystal clear for the audience in one lovely moment when a pampered guy looks straight into the camera and says...

“There's never been a better time to be a man. The willing women. The dandy clothes. The frills. The big rings and jewellery. The open shirts. The sense of entitlement. Take it from me: savour this time. For it will soon be gone, never to return.”

As the film progressed I found that, rather than get bored by what might, at first, seem like a one joke movie, I was witness to a minor masterpiece with something new and rewarding in most scenes. There’s some great stuff in here... the stereotypical gay male hairdresser who is working on Barbie’s hair and the neighbour who comes in to ‘borrow a cup of sugar’ (both Barbie and the hairdresser get turned on by the watching neighbour’s sugar eating shenanigans), the silly songs (which are a heck of a lot more on the nose in this than they were in The Love Witch, it seems to me), the old “Give it to me! Love it! Oh yes!” rapid shoot photographer scene (I used to be a child model in the early 1970s and I can tell you now, stereotype or not, that’s exactly how some of them behaved) and the fact that when her husband is taken ill and being treated in hospital with stress because she comes home late one night rather than have the dinner waiting, she feels it’s appropriate to go to the hospital in a sexy nurse outfit to show how much she intends to care for her husband. There’s some crazy stuff in this film.

Now I was a little puzzled, as I was with The Love Witch when I saw this because, while the director is doing her best to evoke America in the early 1970s, the soundtrack sounds more like it’s been needle-dropped in from Italian composers and, as it turns out once again, that’s exactly what is happening here. However, I figured it out after a while because there were a few scenes which sounded like they were being tracked in from Piero Piccioni’s score to US sexploitation director Radley Metzger’s Camille 2000 and, by about the third time it turned up on the soundtrack in one guise or another, I was pretty sure. This is further enhanced during a big orgy scene where Viva, as the reimagined call-girl variation of Barbie is known, is being drug-raped. Biller actually uses the same differential focussing and refocussing trick, timed to the main character’s breathing, that Metzger used in Camille 2000 and which you can find fully described by me in my review of that film here. And this, coupled with the score in this scene, very specifically identifies at least one of the director’s main inspirations for this movie... albeit with a much different motivation towards the subject matter.

About that sequence... although the mise en scène in this shot isn’t nearly as accomplished as Metzger’s original version, Biller takes it all to the next absurdist level. In this one, instead of focussing on flowers, Biller focusses on apples and then, after the shot I just described, the colours posterise and the apples become animated, floating fruits licking and then continuing with one eating the others. That cartoon apple then stretches or warps out to become a load of swirling, psychedelic flowers before the blood or juice of the apple starts to shower down over the live action screen of Viva being molested. It’s almost like the artist is criticising the original scene by going so over the top with it that you can’t help but see how ridiculous it is... at least in this context. I was blown away by the shot in Camille 2000 and still am. However, it’s a great visual moment from Biller in a film which is filled to the brim with amazing stuff like this.

And that’s about as far as I’m going with this review, I think, other than to say that Viva was a total blast to watch and, with lines like (on being informed a man’s wife has got a job interview) “Will you be back in time to cook dinner?” and a parody of Just Two Little Girls From Little Rock from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the film has enough surprises and little tricks up its sleeve to keep you entertained for its considerable two hours (a fair amount longer than most of the sexploitation films the director is parodying to make her points here). A solid recommendation on this one with the reminder that you need to keep an open mind about the style of acting in this and not dismiss it until you realise how skillful the artists are being here. Now I just have to wait around while the lady in question makes another movie. Can we have a giallo next, please?

Double Agent 73

A Boob To A Kill

Double Agent 73
USA 1974 Directed by Doris Wishman
Something Weird Videos Blu Ray Zone A

After the deadly disappointment of Doris Wishman’s first Chesty Morgan movie Deadly Weapons (reviewed by me here) I wasn’t in too much of a hurry to get back to the Chesty Morgan’s Bosom Buddies Blu Ray that I purchased last year. However, now that I’ve seen this second entry in the director and actress’ collaborative CV, I have to say that Double Agent 73 was a heck of a lot better than I was expecting and way more watchable than the previous film. That is to say, that first movie wasn’t even good in a ‘so bad it’s good’ way whereas... Double Agent 73 is absolutely quite bad in the most entertaining way.

The film starts off with Chesty stripping off during the credits and the clicking of her camera breast each time she squeezes said appendage brings up a new title card full of names. Wait... did I say ‘camera breast’? Oh yes... I’ll get to that in a minute.

The film starts properly when we are shown two villains playing cards in a private residence. We know the two are bad guys because one of them has a red blotch down the side of his face and is accompanied by a fiercely sinister musical stinger which, according to the music credit on the movie, is the work of Cine Top... who I can only assume is a needle drop library providing music by the yard. We are also shown a ‘spy’ going through the house and the movie nicely dates itself in this scene by having an old time photo-cube in a shot.

The spy guy finds some sinister looking film in a drawer. He steals it but, as he tries to make his getaway, he is spotted and caught by our two card playing fiends. The two villains consult their villanous boss, Mr. Toppler, with the spy in question and we know his identity must be important to the slow unravelling of the film because we only ever see Toppler in silhouette at this point in the proceedings. So by now your bad movie senses should be kicking in and telling you that the mystery of who this guy is should be pretty easy to solve from fairly early on in the movie and... yep, so it is.

Anyway, Toppler tells his bad boys to get rid of the spy so they take him down the street and run him over. They do a bad job of it too because they leave him alive long enough to tell a passer by in the street something before he finally shuffles off this mortal coil...

Cut to Chesty Morgan’s character Jane Genet (Agent 73) as she watches a group of men and women playing naked volleyball and sunbathes while reading her newspaper in her black, lacy underwear. Actually, it looks like the volleyball game is spliced in footage from another completely different movie because, even as she’s ‘paged’ and called away, she doesn’t once interact with the footage we’ve been shown of the game as an establishing shot and I can only assume this stuff is culled from one of the director’s earlier nudist movies and then just spliced in to give the illusion of having a budget. So then Chesty, who is a secret agent (it transpires), flies back to wherever she works and is called in to get a new mission briefing regarding a truly fuzzy plot to do with... drugs, I think... I honestly couldn’t say and I was really trying hard to find some sense in the plot here but, it all involves the mysterious Toppler in some capacity. This scene is really hard to watch, actually, because it involves a lot of cutting between a classic conversation set up with each shot involving either Chesty or her boss ‘face on’ as the main subject of the shot with the back of the other’s head in the corner.... which is a pretty basic thing you wouldn’t think you could screw up except each of the character’s faces seem to be in much less focus than the back of the other person’s head each time the shot changes. You’d think with the lady in question playing the main lead, they’d at least be able to get their ‘rack focusing’ done right.

Actually, I don’t like her boss in this picture. For starters he gives her a dumb assignment which involves finding leads, taking pictures of any clues and then eliminating the people she finds with the mysterious ‘clues’ and recording their picture so the people back at base can see who she’s taking care of. Also, he uses phrases like “This is extremely imperative, Jane.” Seriously? What kind of messed up grammar is that? That’s as redundant and awful as trying to say something is ‘very excellent’... don’t worry though, I won’t be trying to say that about this movie.

So anyway, the way Jane is supposed to take pictures is through an XL camera which her boss has implanted in her left breast, activating it with the whirr and click of the shutter by giving it a good squeeze. Which is, like, probably one of the most impractical secret agent, super spy gadgets in the history of film, maybe? So every time she wants to take a photograph she has to go topless and squeeze herself in the right direction. No information is given as to how she is supposed to focus or frame a shot... it’s just get her breast out and ‘smile for the mamera’. Makes no sense.

What also makes no sense is the nurse who assists with the surgery trying to kill off Chesty when she’s still groggy from the operation. No problem though. Chesty’s Jane is a smart cat and she dispatches the nurse by strangling her with a phone cord... and then plays with her breasts so she can take some pictures of her, naturally. Hmmm... it’s almost like this is just a ruse so the lead actress can keep getting her bosoms out for the audience, you know?

Okay, so this is a terrible movie but, like I said, it’s pretty enjoyable in places and I really wish I’d have been watching this one with an audience. Pretty soon we are into real ‘budget film-making’ when Chesty and an informant are speaking in a night club. Except... just like the nudist volleyball scene, the footage of the party with all the people doesn’t in any way match Chesty and a guy standing alone against a wall in what looks like it’s supposed to be in the same room as the party. Once more, none of the party footage is on the screen at the same time that Chesty and her companion are in shot but, the really brilliant thing Wishman does here... and it’s quite cheeky... is to cover the wall in bacofoil, shine some ‘Bava-tastic’ red and green lights on it and wobble it about a bit. For literally half a second you think you are watching a load of people dancing behind Chesty... until you realise that, no, ambient atmosphere or not, it’s just a piece of shiny foil being woggled about for a bit. It’s genius, it looks totally rubbish and... I love it. Nice attempt at a solution to having no money there. This brought a smile to my face.

There’s lots of more absurdly stupid things happening in this movie. Such as when a naked Chesty wards off a guy by knocking him down a couple of times in a fist fight... well, I say a fistfight but Chesty actually uses her breasts of doom, throwing them about like a pair of fists and doing some damage which, while it sounds completely stupid (and it is completely stupid, I assure you), actually looks kind of credible because the director slows the footage down so it looks like there really is some weight behind the main star of the show’s natural, sizeable assets.

Later on she lets herself get caught so she can take out a guy with her exploding lipstick. Meanwhile, a man stabs a girl who he mistakes for Chesty in a shower in a quite grisly, gory yet entirely unconvincing murder scene. When a guy comes after Chesty she squirts some gas from a smoking hooka thingamajig and then kills her immobile victim by filling his throat with ice cubes... which I guess is kinda inventive for a Doris Wishman film, I would say. Another spectacular kill comes when she somehow, through the magic of non-matching camera footage, manages to throw her earring across the room... right into the neck of her potential assailant. And of course, all through the movie, each time she takes out another bad guy or gal, she has to get her breasts out and take some photographs of them.

I’m not going to reveal anymore of the story here but, it has to be said, it’s totally silly... as is the ending and the revelation that Chesty is in danger because the spy camera has a hidden time bomb in it which will go off if she doesn’t report back to base in time. Why? Why the heck would you send out a trusted agent with a bomb in her bosom? This really begs the question as to why her boss, who presumably authorised this, would be working in an ‘intelligence’ agency. Oh well... I guess you can only be as intelligent as your script.

And that’s about all I’ve got to say about this one other than to reiterate that, of the two Chesty movies I’ve seen, this one is definitely the more fun and also, although she’s not great in it, she’s certainly a hell of a lot more credible and interesting in Double Agent 73 than she was in Deadly Weapons. I’d have liked to have seen her in a few more things after this, as I reckon she had the potential to become something more if given the right opportunities but, alas, her career only went on to include a deleted scene pulled from a Fellini movie and an unconfirmed appearance in a 1980s film. Which is a shame.

Still, I enjoyed this one and if you’re still on the fence about picking up the US Zone 1 Blu Ray Chesty Morgan’s Bosom Buddies, all I can say is, for me at least, this one was worth the price of admission, purely as a celebration of stupidity. Recommended for a room full of guys and gals who are heavily ‘alcoholed up’ and if you don’t mind people shouting at the screen in response to the ridiculous antics of the characters who inhabit this strange, alternative and amply cleavaged version of the cold war warriors of the US of A. Great stuff.

Enter The Void

Womb With A View

Enter The Void (Director’s Cut)
France/Germany/Italy/Canada 2009
Directed by Gaspar Noé  
Entertainment One DVD Region 2

Warning: A big spoiler here about the end of the movie but I’ve marked it it just before I get there.

I saw Gaspar Noé’s movie Irreversible some years back now. It was an okay film but I’m not sure it was completely deserving the acclaim it garnered. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t... but it’s quite possible I’ve become kinda jaded to certain types of cinema that layer themselves behind a veil of inscrutability to end up taking you to a point that’s somewhat obvious. Irreversible took me to that point but at least it had a strong moral centre... so I was curious enough to check out the director’s much publicised movie Enter The Void in its longer, directors cut. It was about time, after all, that I finally caught up to this movie.

The film starts with some bizarre electronic drone on the score as gazillions of credits hurtle past you at a speed which renders them almost unreadable. This is followed by the introduction of some ‘thump heavy’ nightclub electronic music as a second section of credits starts, again too fast for the human eye to handle but with some amazing, different font transformations and colours as it rushes to the opening of the movie.

The first thing which will probably strike you as you watch this is that it is, for the most part (although there a few contradictory shots in the first section of the movie), shot completely from the point of view of the main protagonist, Oscar, who is living in Tokyo making an okay living from dealing drugs, somewhat responsibly... if that’s not a contradiction. He makes so much money at it that he’s able to buy a ticket for his sister, who went to a different foster home when they were both orphaned as young ‘uns, to come to Tokyo and live with him. She does so but the problem with the whole camera eye thing, where Oscar’s eyes double for the camera lens, is that... just over 20 minutes into this movie, which lasts a good two and a half hours plus, Oscar is shot dead by the police, the camera focusing on his bloody hands as he realises he has been shot and dies.

However... because this is a movie by a director not afraid to explore the boundaries of cinema somewhat, this doesn’t stop the camera from staying with Oscar for the rest of the movie. In the first 20 minutes of the movie, Oscar (played by Nathaniel Brown) talks with his sister, Linda... before she goes off to the nightclub where she works as a stripper/pole dancer... he’s rung by his friend Victor, just as he’s started tripping (the bizarre manifestations of the drug trip reminded me of some kind of subatomic universe and you can see it’s based on biological shapes, which is handy because we are often told that this particular drug is like what happens to the human brain after you die). Something has happened to the relationship between Oscar and Victor and he has to bring Victor his stash of drugs. Oscar’s artist friend Alex, who is sweet on Linda, accompanies him some of the way, filling him in on the specifics of the Tibetan Book Of The Dead he’s leant Oscar, thus setting up the rest of the movie’s narrative stance. When Oscar gets to the rendezvous point, it’s a set up and Oscar is shot through the door of a bathroom as he tries to flush the drugs in a police sting.

Alex is played by Cyril Roy, Victor by Olly Alexander and Linda by the absolutely wonderful Paz de la Huerta. Now, I raved about La Heuerta when I saw her for the first time in Nurse 3D (reviewed here) and here, she performs with a more naturalistic style to her acting. It’s quite an eye opener because, although she’s extremely sexy and out of her clothes quite often, she is not playing anything like the psychotic and vengeful serial killer she played in Nurse 3D. Here she plays a somewhat naive and less decisive character but, she does an absolutely wonderful job here and I really do have to catch up with some more of this woman’s work.

After this extended opening sequence, we move into the second section of the movie.

This film is set up into three sections, you see... the first being the last 20 minutes or so of Oscar’s life. The next hour or so is a flashback summation of key points in his life which tell us of his special relationship with his sister, takes us through the car crash which leaves the two of them orphans, then gets to his moving to Tokyo, how he makes friends with Victor (and how Victor’s mum makes ‘more than just friends’ with him), his friendship with Alex and, ultimately, how everything came to set up the opening sequence, which we then go through again in edited highlights but from a slightly different perspective since we are now travelling as Oscars soul so, everything is seen from behind Oscar, as opposed to actually from within Oscar’s eyes when he was inhabiting that body.

We then go into the third section of the film which is Oscar’s soul flying around in the aftermath of what’s happened and his jumping through time to see what becomes of all the other characters... in search of... something which seemed obvious to me as soon as we started the third section of the movie, to be honest.

The film is pretty much moving camera throughout, with very few shots which are viewed statically. Your eyes will be in a constant state of interaction with the shots paraded past your retina and my one criticism would be the adoption of this style in the very first section of the movie, where the camera actually inhabit’s Oscar’s body. Thing is, a moving camera is a fine way of half capturing the human visual experience on a daily basis... but only half. Human beings are constantly moving their heads around all the time but... they’re also moving their eyes and the eyes usually fixate on something and focus on it rather than just whizz by everything as the head moves... so it’s a nice movie convention and I guess I don’t know how Noé may have achieved anything closer, but it somehow didn’t strike me as a particularly good match for the material during the first 20ish minutes, to be honest.

The film’s colour palette is vastly oversaturated in the most pleasant way, looking like Mario Bava on acid is the phrase which cropped up in my mind as I was watching. It’s quite often dictated by the various neon signs flashing through the windows of whatever room the camera eye is spending time in but, even when it’s not, the colours are exaggerated and, well, quite pleasing to the eye, I have to admit. I could have done without some of the strobe effects when the soul is flying around, though, and I’m almost kinda glad I never had to watch this in the cinema.

It seems, in this last section, we can also enter the dreams of at least one of the characters and I have to say, there are some marvellous shot transitions as various temporal and spatial anomalies are created in a way that marries them up perfectly. Noé’s meticulous planning is highlighted by the way the edits work when they really shouldn’t and he must have put a heck of a lot of work into the design of this movie. He also, in this last section, uses various portals found in situations to travel between points in time. For instance, he will wander over the rim of the urn which will contain the dead character’s  ashes, or a bowl, or a window... and then he will take another pass at it and swoop through the said shape into the next sequence. Once you realise this is what the director is doing, it becomes kinda fun to figure out which object in a room or in a landscape will be the next thing the director picks as another portal for Oscar’s camera eye... amusing stuff.

Big spoiler now.

My biggest problem with the film is that it’s hugely predictable. As I started the third section I figured the soul is looking for a way to re-enter life and I kept waiting for Paz de la Huerta’s character, Linda, to get pregnant. She does so, twice as it happens, and sure enough... on the second time we are inside her vagina as Alex ejaculates onto the camera. We then turn and ride the sperm down, following it into the camera soul’s sister before being reborn as Linda’s child. Okay, so it’s probably the only logical conclusion at this point in the movie but I did think it was kind of obvious and I really hate it when I can predict the ending of a movie so long before that ending actually happens.

End of spoiler.

That being said, Enter The Void is not hard to watch and, because of the constantly enquiring camera eye, it isn’t exactly slow paced. I think some audiences might find the film a challenge in terms of the length and fragmented nature of the, quite episodic narrative flow but, ultimately, if you are into cinema then you will probably find the film a joyous celebration of the media. It’s not a film you can put on to pass the time with your half inebriated mates on a Saturday night, for sure but, all in all I found it much more interesting than the same director’s Irreversible. Not exactly a feel good film but not something which isn’t life affirming either. Maybe give this one a go if you have a long stretch of time on your hands.