OF INHUMAN BONDAGE

Fifty Shades of Grey is a monumentally boring motion picture. Whatever value there is to a smash hit movie written, directed, and produced by women, and pitched to an audience of women as a way for them to enjoy an expression of sexuality; whatever damage the film threatens to do by seriously misrepresenting the (healthy) act of BDSM-laced consensual sex as a (tremendously unhealthy) game played by broken molestation victims as a way of bullying other people into becoming sexual punching bags; these are conversations worth having. But they're conversations that seem a little bit feeble when stacked next to the far more concrete facts of what Fifty Shades of Grey actually is on a tangible cinematic level, and not a theoretical one. Which is a monumentally boring motion picture.

In more objective terms, FSOG is about Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson), a senior-year English major at a college located in either Washington state, Oregon, or British Columbia, depending on which piece of evidence located in which scene you prefer to believe. Her roommate Kate (Eloise Mumford), a journalism major and the editor, or something, of the school paper, has come down terribly sick, which is why the film opens with Anastasia (Anastasia Steele! That sounds more like the name of a morally questionable Bond girl than the protagonist of an erotic drama. A heterosexual erotic drama, anyway) doing Kate a solid by heading to Grey House, the Seattle-based hub of Grey Enterprises, the massive business operated by 27-year-old Wunderkind Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan), who has consented to give Kate an interview. Anastasia's utter inability to function as a journalist - it becomes clear almost immediately that she didn't even read Kate's prepared questions prior to setting in Christian's office - does not in any way offend the incredibly important businessman, who throws himself into stalking the young woman. Only it's not stalking if one is a gorgeous, indescribably wealthy businessman, apparently. She starts to fall in love, but he's more interested in making her the newest in a line of women servicing his very rigid fetishes: he wants to introduce the easily confused virgin into the world of his bondage and punishment-based sex fantasies, with a contract spelling out every last thing Anastasia must do, everything Christian can't do, and how their lives will be structured to facilitate it all. While endlessly discussing this contract, they occasionally have vanilla sex.

So that's the plot. The whole plot, covering 125 minutes worth of movie. It's easy to complain about films in which nothing happens, but that's the kind of criticism I'll be more leery of in the future, now that I've seen Fifty Shades of Grey. For this is a film in which actually nothing happens, all the way up to its enraging non-ending, which not only finds nothing resolved on the way to the film's two sequels, but calls attention to the lack of any story arc or even much of a character arc up to that point. She loses her virginity. That is the totality of the character development that happens to either lead.

That the film is military-grade boring and thuddingly mediocre is, after a sense, an enormous achievement. I haven't read the Twilight fanfic turned copyright-dodging erotic novel by E.L. James that serves as its base, but not for want of trying; only a few pages of the book version of FSOG was enough to scare me out of the rest. And I understand from those who know more that it never really gets better, and that the overall subliteracy of the piece only intensifies after that opening. So the fact that director Sam Taylor-Johnson and writer Kelly Marcel were able to wrest it into something merely banal is worthy of real admiration, even though I'd have personally preferred a reprehensibly awful Fifty Shades of Grey to the one that exists in all its generic flatness. Particularly in light of the extremely well-publicised feuding between Taylor-Johnson and James (who served as one of the producers) over every last damn little thing, and the vivid lack of chemistry between the leads.

Those leads really are something - in a film that stakes everything on the crackling tension between two sexy young people being enough to keep us invested in the scenes of them talking about the nothing that they're doing (the estimate I've seen is that 20 minutes of the film is sex scenes; this seems too generous by at least 25%), having such absolutely unacceptable actors is a film killer if nothing else was. Johnson, at least, has some personality; perhaps dimly aware that everything around her was going terribly wrong, she tries to put an ironic, self-aware spin on things, playing up the almost non-existent comedy of the script and being generally sharper, more acerbic, and wittier than I think Marcel set her up to be.

Dornan, man, he's just the fucking cat's pajamas. You can tell, as clearly as it has ever been possible to psychoanalyse an actor from his performance, that he decided on the second day of shooting that he'd made the wrong decision and wanted out, but knew there was nothing he could do about it. The Belfast native locks himself into a cast-iron American accent so stiff and mechanical that he literally can't inflect any lines, so everything he says comes out in the same angry bark, as Dornan spits out individual words like watermelon seeds. He looks with sullen resentment at Johnson in every one of their scenes together - and it's surely no accident that Taylor-Johnson and the team of editors work hard to keep the lead actors in separate shots as often as possible, and his visibly disinterest in their sex scenes is the absolute antithesis of erotica. One feels that Christian Grey would rather stick his cock in a garbage disposal than Anastasia. And while Johnson at least manages to spin some of her worst dialogue (and there is some vile dialogue here, most of it, I understand, directly taken from the book) in a way that makes it clear that the character doesn't take it very seriously and we shouldn't either, Dornan digs in an makes it all sound so grave and soporific; perhaps it was the only way he could manage to survive such bons mots as "I don't make love. I fuck. Hard." and "I'm fifty shades of fucked-up" without collapsing into giggles. But it doesn't make for good cinema.

While the actors are drowning and Taylor-Johnson fights to keep the movie from turning into an Ed Woodian clusterfuck, the only sparkle is provided by Seamus McGarvey and David Wasco, the cinematographer and production designer, respectively, who collude in making the film live up to its title in the most fascinating way that such an austere palette could provide. There's a sleek coldness to the look of Grey House and Christian's tony abode, with its beautiful, painterly vistas of Seattle, in which the sharp lines of the set and color-starved decorating and the coolly hard lighting all combine to make something beautiful but sterile and dehumanised; if the story seems indecently fixated on selling Christian's cruelty as romantic or erotic, the look of the film quietly but forcibly demands that we really regard him as the icy bastard that, in real life, would be the only appropriate way to respond to him. On top of the whole movie just looking stylish as a motherfucker.

It's the only way in which the film really distinguishes itself. The hope that a woman director would stage sex scenes in any way other than the same old close-ups on nipples and arched backs and all that happen in every erotic thriller made by a man proves to be totally unfounded, leaving us with a smattering of tastefully R-rated setpieces indistinguishable from hundreds of others - even just this year, we had The Boy Next Door using almost all of the same angles in its one big sex scene, and if anything, more emphasis on the nude male backside involved. So it's not sexy. And the filmmakers are so focused on keeping the campiness out of the final product that they succeed only in stripping it of its vitality. So it's not very fun or funny. It's not very anything; it exists, barely, and it occupies time, too much of it, and then it simple falls apart into the credits. Fifty shades of grey, it turns out, look very indistinguishable from an uninterrupted field of beige.

4/10

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BDSM WEEK: ROSIE CHEEKS

If, for whatever reason, you wanted to make the most ice-cold, vagina-drying, boner-killing movie about sex in all of cinema history, you would first have to confront the fact that Exit to Eden already exists, and it has set that bar inordinately high. It's no surprise, really, that nothing good could should come of a film taking place mostly on a Pacific island commune dedicated to the pursuit of BDSM, in the hands of director Garry Marshall, a man with an inerrant ability to turn everything into a stiflingly obvious sitcom. There's no tinned laugh track that follows the litany of terrible, coming-from-a-mile-away gags presented in Exit to Eden, but it sure as hell feels like there should be. And to the surprise of absolutely nobody, that garrulous, eager-to-please Borscht Belt mentality is just about the worst conceivable fit for an erotic drama about a man too proud to admit that he likes to be dominated and a dominatrix too terrified of being hurt to allow herself to drop her defenses. Which, let's be blunt, is already a pretty groan-worthy set-up for a BDSM story, but when you put that in the hands of a man constitutionally hellbent on making cookie-cutter mass entertainment, you have the ingredients for a truly punishing exercise in the worst kind of dopey humor mingled with the worst kind of prurient fascination with kinky sex.

And that's without even mentioning the way that Exit to Eden pairs its damp love story with a comedy about two sharp LAPD officers trying to stop a diamond smuggler, which I understand to be the entire invention of screenwriters Deborah Amelon and Bob Brunner, a massively misguided add-on to the novel vampire maven Anne Rice wrote under a pen name. I think one could spend quite a long time trying to figure out what, on balance, is the worst thing about the film: its deeply unerotic eroticism, or its more deeply unfunny comedy. The sex scenes are more boring, anyway.

So let's meet our two threads, anyway. The first starts in Australia, in 1974, where a young boy named Elliot Slater (Brian Davila) purposefully gets himself in trouble so the family's busty French maid (Rajia Baroudi) will angrily spank him. 20 years later, the grown-up Elliot (Paul Mercurio) still loves to be punished, but he's had a difficult time articulating that to his potential lovers, which is why he has applied for a most singular program. His friend, Dr. Martin Helifax (Hector Elizondo) is the proprietor of a private island of the coast of Mexico, Eden, which is a combination retreat/therapy center for the personal exploration of sexuality as it relates to domination and submission. Elliot has passed the apparently rigorous psychological profiling necessary to travel to become a "Citizen", or submissive partner, there to be able to live out all his fantasies of being smacked, yelled out, and ordered around.

Meanwhile, Sheila Kingston (Rosie O'Donnell) and Fred Lavery (Dan Aykroyd), partners on the Los Angeles police force, are hot in pursuit of Omar (Stuart Wilson), a mysterious jewel thief who has never been photographed or described, and his right-hand henchwoman, Nina Blackstone (Iman). The first we meet Sheila and Fred, they're disguised as, respectively, a dancer and a DJ at a strip club, which is what we call "foreshadowing" in the screenwriting business. Clomping around in her boa, waving a gun, Sheila cuts in with the first wave of a nightmarishly persistent pattern of voice-over to snottily joke, "I'm a cop. Thought I was a supermodel? Don't feel bad, everyone makes that mistake". Because, you see, Rosie O'Donnell is a disgusting fatty who nobody would ever find sexy. That's the least fair kind of joke ever - and circa-1994 O'Donnell is pretty damn good-looking by every human standard outside of the mainstream American film industry - and Jesus Horatio Christ, is Exit to Eden ever ecstatic to exploit her purported hideousness, standing back with arms wide open to let in all the guffaws as this ungainly, graceless, tart-tongued woman talks like somebody who could possibly be found sexual desirable, en route to putting her in a snug leather bustier from which she pokes out in all the wrong places. It would be infinitely more dispiriting if O'Donnell's performance wasn't so brittle and arch and thus felt like it was feeding the meanspirited humor even more than the script already would have it.

The stories cross paths when Elliot quite inadvertently snaps a photo of Omar in the act of pulling out a packet of black market diamonds, on his way to Eden. The criminals are thus after him, and the cops chase both the criminals and Elliot's film cans, and so everybody ends up on Eden: Elliot to find himself quite besotted by headmistress Lisa (Dana Delany), Nina to enjoy life as a sexually predatory gorgeous woman, Omar to stand around grousing, Sheila to shoot off zingers followed by zingy observations about how everybody is a people, even the ones who like BDSM, and Fred is miserable and uncomfortable and obliged to pretend that he's a janitor to avoid having to partake of the sexuality in any way.

Picking out the worst thing about Exit to Eden is prohibitively hard, but a strong candidate would have to be that awful fucking voiceover, which O'Donnell delivers in a speedy staccato that obviously wants to evoke terse narration of film noir - which it doesn't - only in way that's sassy and robustly comic - which it isn't. Another strong contender would be the absolutely impossible performances given by Delany and Mercurio (the latter having only ever appeared in one film, the sweet-minded "wacky Aussies" comedy Strictly Ballroom, where his callowness and artificial mien were used to more stable effect), stilted and inhuman, so devoid of human warmth that when they doff their clothes to make out and have simulated sex that Marshall and company shoot with a kind of delighted "naughty child peeking between interlaced fingers" remove, it's a little surprising that you can't hear the plastic parts squeaking as they rub together. Seriously, nobody gives a good, or even halfway functional performance in the film (except for Iman, maybe, who also has the broadest major role), but even by the lowered standards here, Delany is shockingly inauthentic and forced. There is no pleasure here, nor self-reflection, nor even a particularly strong command of the English language, based on some of her line readings.

To be fair, Delany is particularly ill-served by the genial comic tone that Marshall spackles onto everything, since hers is the most serious of all roles. Aye, the comedy, that's another thing going spectacularly wrong: at its best, it's desperately obvious and corny, and sometimes it gets worse and adds tone-deaf tastelessness on top of it (e.g. O'Donnell's cringing parody of Iman's speaking voice; the running gag wherein Sheila mocks Fred by loudly describing her period). But the really awful thing is how the broad, surface-level humor collides with the frequent nudity and frank sex talk, reducing everything the braying world of particularly filthy burlesque. It's a leering, dirty movie, though I think entirely by accident; Marshall is not a leering filmmaker by any stretch of the imagination (think of how successfully he denuded the R-rated prostitute comedy Pretty Woman of any genuine sexual edge), just one who wants to make things as safe and accessible to the most basic mainstream audience. In applying that mentality to the defiantly un-mainstream world of BDSM, the perhaps inevitable effect is to titter at it with embarrassment, to linger on it and make it seem outright smutty. I have no stake in the behaviors being depicted onscreen; I do however, prefer not to have to deal with the confusing mental anguish of such featherweight jokes being steamrolled by such crass depictions of clearly artificial fucking.

All of this coalesces into a completely unacceptable, unwatchable cinematic object: only a handful of times does a joke manage to spark enough to generate any kind of energy, and it sputters out again the second that either plot clicks through another generic event, or any of the actors cough up another line through palpable self-loathing (Aykroyd), dogged determination to make anything out of this hellacious mess (O'Donnell), or just plain ineptitude (everyone else). It's a movie whose insipidity keeps being sharpened with every new wrinkle, every new line, and every new banal bit of staging; it feels like the flatness of it all should end up turning into anesthetic mush, but no, Exit to Eden keeps finding new ways to inflict pain. Just like its characters, only there is nothing all pleasurable involved in this act of sadism.

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BDSM WEEK: HELL FOR LEATHER

Like a great many films that were birthed in controversy, time has somewhat mellowed opinions towards Cruising since its notorious first release in 1980. Once a film universally condemned by gay rights groups for its apparent series of transitive arguments that male homosexuality = the leather/S&M scene = self-hating gays murdering everybody, the film has even to some degree been reclaimed as a precious time capsule offering a view into the New York leather subculture right before AIDS came along to largely eradicate it and its freewheeling casual sex. And it is beautiful that different people can see one object and interpret it different ways and take wildly different meanings from it, but I just don't see it. There are readings of the film that make it possible to take it as a deliberately cryptic mind-trip and not a foggily-expressed thriller with half-assed characteristations and a third act that collapse under the weight of its own ambiguity. But there are not, that I can imagine, any readings of the film that make it actually empowering towards gay people.

Reducing the film to its hook does absolutely nobody any favors, but let's anyway to get things rolling: somebody is murdering and dismembering homosexual men in New York, linked only by their general appearance and their frequenting of a handful of leather bars in Greenwich Village. Capt. Edelson (Paul Sorvino) of the NYPD homicide division has his job on the line if he can't crack the case, so he goes for broke: from the rank and file, he plucks up one Officer Steve Burns (Al Pacino), who physically resembles the victims, to go deep undercover. Specifically, Burns is to infiltrate the Village leather scene and offer himself as bait, in the hopes of flushing the killer out. But when this straight cop - who glides through Edelson's crass questioning of his sexual history, and has a female girlfriend, Nancy (Karen Allen), and everything - enters the bizarre realm of gay BDSM, handkerchief codes, and easy anonymous sex, things become far more troubling and distressing than just the ordinary stress of being undercover.

What, exactly, starts to happen in Burns's mind is exactly what Cruising remains steadily ambiguous on, but it seems in any case to begin with the sheer rampant Otherness of the leather fetishists. Writer-director William Friedkin took enormous pains to make sure that everybody understood that he wasn't making claims about gay men in particular, or even about the very narrow substrata of gay male life that serves as Cruising's backdrop, but it's hardly besmirching the film's aims or its effectiveness to suggest that it adopts a boggle-eyed confusion bordering on terror bordering on dreams in depicting the bars and clubs where Burns - hiding under the name of "John Forbes" - goes cruising for the killer. The way the camera peers around with prurient revulsion is half Alice in Wonderland, half David Lynch (or would have been, if there was a good base of David Lynch films to speak of by 1980), and while nothing in the film suggests that it, or Friedkin, or anybody else involved has any actual negative feelings about gay people per se, it's obviously the case that we are meant to feel spectacularly confused and disturbed by our plunge into that environment, which is presented with deliberately confusing editing and unearthly lighting and a very tense, darting camera. It is a waking nightmare, pure and simple.

This is not all that surprising a direction for Friedkin to take, given his career-long commitment to the idea that everything is awful, and people are corrupt and prone to wickedness, especially the ones who should most especially be held to a higher morality. The weirdness of the leather bars isn't a referendum on gayness so much as a referendum on humanity, and it's the rawness, visual distinctiveness, open sexual activity, and above all things the mainstream unfamiliarity of the setting that recommends as the backdrop for what is, ultimately, not the story of how a mysterious killer is (or isn't?) found out, but how a cop can have his identity broken and reassembled incorrectly. Undoubtedly, there's a healthy impulse to shock the squares present in the hard-R depiction of what goes on in Those Places, but it's not ultimately what Cruising is about.

What it is about can be a little difficult to parse. The most generous possible reading of the film would be to think of it as something of a riff on the more florid of the Italian gialli made in the idiom of the New Hollywood subgenre of filthy, gritty stories about street life in New York. Glance at a still frame, and you'd guess from James Contner's grainy, color-parched cinematography that it's one of the handful of attempts around the turn of the decade to desperately pretend that it was still 1975 and artfully artless urban docurealist filmmaking was still all the range. But put it in motion, pair it with the tinny, pasted-on sound design (a happy accident: the film had to work around protesters trying to ruin the shoot with noise), and Jack Nitzsche's industrial droning that passes for music, and you start to get a sense of sickly, creeping terror. It is a film whose visual and audible textures feel entirely ill, doom-ridden and death-soaked even without reference to the specifics of the plot, portraying a world of men doggedly, madly pursuing sex in the face of a well-publicised threat right in their midst, mysteriously selecting victims and killing them for their sexual behavior (one could say it predicts the AIDS crisis, but it's best, I think, not to risk adopting Cruising's corrosive cynicism as a frame to ever think about the spread of AIDS).

So the generous reading, again, is that the film is anxious to work first on the level of mood and impression reached more by Italian genre films (primarily; other examples can be found throughout Europe), to impart a sense of inexplicable awfulness, to work as a stylistic exaggeration of a cop story. Even the murder scenes, each of them a wildly different collage of violence with jarring visual discontinuity, have a certain European flair. And the blank slate Burns, an empty vessel into which we can pour all the psychoanalysis in the world only to find it all draining out immediately, would be perfect in a giallo.

That generosity stumbles a bit in facing what Cruising actually is, though. Whatever Friedkin's aims might have been - his career isn't marked by the kind of disconcerting non-realism I'm trying to make a case for, but it's not a complete out-of-nowhere curveball - the film itself is a bit more muddled than it is deliberately obscure. The biggest problem is Burns himself, or at least Pacino's performance; while there is value in giving the cop no backstory and only whispers of an interior life before it starts to be torn down by his disorienting experiences, and it's clear what Friedkin hoped to achieve by casting that actor of all actors (quintessentially masculine, but in a very delicate, breakable way, and he's weirdly "pretty" despite looking in no way effeminate), I don't see in Pacino's face the impression that he was making those connections. Instead, he seems to be largely walking, uninfected, through scenes that deny him any kind of Method hook to get into the character. And it's plainly uncomfortable - not in a way that reinforces the film's attempt to build discord, but in a way that reminds us that we're watching Al Pacino standing in front of a camera trying to decide what his character things about watching men screwing. It's alienating in the worst way for what the film wants to achieve.

There's also the whole matter of the script, which simply doesn't gel. Not in the sense that things don't make sense all the time - they don't, and a legendary cut 40 minutes is perhaps to blame - but that the film simply plops things together and expects story and meaning to emerge from the fact that they are now adjacent. It's most ineffective when it starts to flesh out the maybe-probably killer near the end, and the attempt to balance Burns's increasing fragmentation with the flat, generic crime movie staging of all the scenes finds the film tripping over rake after rake for some 30 straight minutes. But there's a nagging disconnect between how the film "feels" and what it does much earlier, such as when Burns is given a chipper gay sidekick in the form of Ted Bailey (Don Scardino), or every time Burns retrenches to the arms of the horribly underwritten Nancy, a series of gestures that don't suggest normalcy, self-delusion, or anything other than a calculated attempt to remind a skittish audience, at intervals, that the protagonist for real really likes pussy.

I want to admire the stylish madness of Cruising; but the film makes it incredibly hard to do so. It's certainly not the grotesque failure of art and morality described in 1980: as failures go, it's a tremendously interesting one. But a failure nonetheless: a failure at digging into a subculture with any kind of class or insight, of marrying a pointedly inscrutable psychodrama with Friedkin's muscly directorial style, a failure of building a basic meat-and-potatoes cop picture that fits together comfortably.

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BDSM WEEK: SEXUAL POLITICS

To the best of my knowledge, at the time of this writing, 1976's In the Realm of the Senses has never been shown uncensored in its home country of Japan. The easy gag is to go for the "ye gods, it's too explicit for the country that invented tentacle porn?" angle, except that glosses over the social complexity that explains not merely why ITROTS - oh, we're going to have to work on finding a better abbreviation, aren't we - was so unprecedentedly controversial when it was made, but also why it was made to begin with. It is not merely a sexual film; it is a critique and deconstruction of Japanese sexual mores constructed into a film-shaped object.

To be a bit more specific, Realm of the Senses is that great theoretical ideal that all of the filmmaking intelligentsia of the 1970s kept driving itself: it is the great example of Artistic Porno. There have been attempts, as long as the film has existed, to somehow reclaim it from the category of pornography, often with the assumption that "art" and "porn" are mutually exclusive categories. But trying to redeem Realm of the Senses from the shameful genre of porn is, I think, to completely misunderstand what it is, what it's doing, and why writer-director Oshima Nagisa made it. The film shows, almost to the exclusion of any anything else, unsimulated sex scenes; the mechanics and fluids involved in sexual intercourse are depicted with unabashed physicality in close-ups and wide shots; and the really important part is that, unlike virtually every other artistically nuanced film containing explicit sex that I can think of, Realm of the Senses has no obvious interest in circumventing our proclivity to finding its sex scenes pleasurable and arousing. It's not prurient, and the grimly transactional feeling that characterises what most of us probably think of as "pornographic" is absent. But it is erotic, and even given the brutal place it winds up, it never feels for a nanosecond that sexual ecstasy is something for which its character or its audience deserve to be punished. That's far, far rarer in cinema throughout the world than explicit onscreen sex itself.

If I understand things correctly, the idealised Japanese audience that has never been able to see the film in the form Oshima wanted would have known exactly where things were going from the start, so allow me to give away the ending: Realm of the Senses is based on the true story of Abe Sada (Matsuda Eiko), who in 1936 killed her lover Ishida "Kichi" Kichizo (Fuji Tatsuya) by strangling him during sex, and cutting of his genitals to take with her as a memento. Oshima's movie trades, heavily, on our knowledge that things are heading in that direction (there's at least one moment of explicit foreshadowing that is, honestly, a bit more corny and leering than a film of such sensitivity and subtlety deserves), but only for purposes of strictly sex-positive humanism. In fact, that In the Realm of the Senses never seems to struggle with balancing self-positivity and a narrative it knows in advance ends with death and dismemberment is, in and of itself, one of the most impressive things about a movie that's basically 102 straight minutes of immaculately controlled filmmaking.

The film's narrative focus is conscribed to the point that it feels like fine lace, defined more by the holes it leaves than what's present. Starting right around the time that former prostitute and current maid Sada meets Kichi while cleaning his home, and the rest of the film consists of virtually nothing other than scenes of them having sex, or the time immediately before and after. Whatever domestic narrative passes between these events is alluded to but never shown; the tense political situation in Japan (the film takes place in the shadow of a failed coup d'etat by certain military leaders, less than three months before Ishida's death; war with China was just a year in the future) at the time is occasionally visible in the background, but it's never the focus. We have, in effect, just enough of a sense of everything that's not Sada and Kichi's increasingly intense sexual assignations to be particularly aware of how much the film isn't paying attention to that everything.

In the context of a culture with as defensive and repressive a relationship to sexuality as Japan - Oshima not only couldn't screen the film there, he couldn't even make it, legally, meaning that the negative had to be brought to France to be developed and edited - this focus on sex as a mutually satisfying and empowering act that requires no kind of narrative or social grounding was itself a bold social statement. Oshima being a reliably, perhaps even exclusively political filmmaker (I've seen only a small handful of his films, but that's the clear connective tissue between them all), it's unsurprising that for him, depicting explicit sex would be a primarily political consideration, and particularly considering its production and distribution woes, In the Realm of the Senses proves to be a uniquely powerful swipe against the culture it depicts. As Sada and Kichi's relationship grows increasingly isolated, it too grows less ashamed and mannered, finding more extreme limits of ecstatic violence and what would be called "aberrant" behavior, if it weren't for the fact that the sex itself is, in a sense, considered "aberrant" in context.

The film isn't exclusively driven by social concerns, though that is its primary focus. It's equally driven by character; and if there's any way in which this explicit, erotic film made almost solely out of sex scenes can rightfully be described as non-pornographic, or even anti-pornographic, it's in the way that it uses sex as a means of building character. Considering how little we actually see them do, we get a strong sense of the two leads, Sada especially (and how much more still can be said about the way that this taboo-busting indictment of Japanese sexual morality fixes specifically on an empowered woman in full ownership of her own desire, contrary to the norms of an especially male-dominated culture?). Part of what the film achieves for itself with all of that nudity and unfaked intercourse is a degree of relaxation and closeness with the characters. When Sada playfully bats at Kichi's penis, we're seeing two people who are totally comfortable with each other enjoying a quiet moment as much as we're seeing sex play (and, for that matter, Matsuda and Fuji have to have been fairly at ease with each other and the crew to be so guilelessly naked for such long stretches). Oshima and cinematographer Ito Hideo's strategy of close-ups and acute angles means that our focus is as much on whole bodies as on genitalia, and we're encouraged to think of the two characters relating to each other as people in love and lust, not just as thrusting, penetrating body parts interacting.

The visual scheme of the film is, overall, quite particular and intentional. It subscribes fully to a very Japanese-specific geometric language with its costumes and sets deliberately suggesting a more archaic time period than the one in which the story takes place; though I am sure it wasn't Oshima's intention (regardless of the film's subsequent history, it's hard to imagine his hope was ever for this to be renowned internationally and unseen in his native country), the overall effect to Western eyes, trained to anticipate a certain kind of Japanese cinema, is that it looks very characteristic of that nation's most important cinematic imports. There's a squared off "room as frame" technique used fairly often that immediately recalls the work of Ozu Yasujiro; the more emphatic cut-ins and sharp angles tend to accentuate the same and depth of cubed spaces, rather than work against them. Take any given frame, and it reads as "Japanese"; except that most of those frames have copious nudity. There's no inoculation against the intellectual disjunction that causes, no matter how much cinematic nudity one has seen. The visual language it subscribes to is almost exclusively used (especially in Ozu, but in plenty of other filmmakers of that generation), to insist on a kind of formalism and mediated approach to drama; In the Realm of the Senses explodes that formalism by virtue of what it depicts.

There is, essentially no distinction between form and content here. The way it depicts the actions it shows and the thoughts it has about what those actions mean are indivisible. It is all about the frank appreciation of sexual behavior in all its extremes, and the firm belief that what brings mutual pleasure to the participants cannot possibly be obscene or licentious or unworthy of visual depiction. The way it moves through its story is so minimalistic that it's almost easier to think of it as an experimental film than as a narrative; but a tremendously successful experiment it is, staged with beauty and complexity and psychological thoughtfulness that I have, personally, seen in no other film on anything resembling the same subject.

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BOTTOM OF THE SEVENTH

I do not, in general, believe in the phenomenon of actors being the solitary saving grace of an otherwise disposable movie, but I'll say this: Jeff Bridges is clearly the solitary reason that Seventh Son is an absolute blast of a bad movie, the kind that immediately upon departing, I wanted to start listing the names of everybody I knew that I had to force it on, and not just a slog through generic plotting and insultingly clumsy dialogue. I like to think that what happened is that they got through the first day of rehearsal, and after realising what kind of cod-Medieval RenFaire bullshit he'd gotten himself wrapped up in, Bridges decided "well fuck this", and concluded that if he could not act so well as to make the film good, at least he could act so poorly as to make the film hilarious. I have not yet figured out the proper way to describe the accent he's up to in this film, but it ranks right up alongside Dick Van Dyke's in Mary Poppins in the hallowed annals of Are You Supposed To Be From England? Because You Sound Like A Looney Tune. The closest I can come up with is that it sounds the Dude doing an impression of Woody Allen playing Sir John Falstaff. It's dumbfounding and precious and beautiful, particularly when he uses it to assault such Bizarro World dialogue as "Stone chuckers chuck stone, and cattle rippers rip cattle" or "There are witches that need killing. Fucking witches". The latter line doubling as the most wildly discordant swear word in a period movie in ages; it pleases me to assume that Bridges ad-libbed it.

At any moment when Bridges is onscreen, talking in his unplaceable drunken drawl, Seven Son is a triumph; the best comedy of the young 2015, and apt to remain that way for a long time. When he's not onscreen, things take an awfully precipitous tumble. There was some money thrown at this, no doubt, and you can see it in things like the shockingly good visual effects (not consistently so - there are some nasty, under-rendered and ill-composited beasties throughout), and Dante Ferretti's rich production design, creating a world that is physically plausible with visual hints of its own history and unexplored backstory like no high fantasy since The Lord of the Rings. It's like taking one of those hilariously crappy sword-and-sorcery pictures from the early '80s, and throwing money and resources at it that the genre had never witnessed, and no matter how rough the going gets, there's always something to look at with childlike admiration.

The going gets very rough, though. The story isn't particularly objectionable, just a by-the-numbers Chosen One story about Thomas Ward (Ben Barnes), the seventh son of a seventh son, and thus destined by God and numerology to be the ideal apprentice to Master Gregory (Bridges), the last of the "spooks", a line of holy soldiers tasked with rooting out the dark creatures throughout the land. The need for such an apprentice is dire: the once-a-century blood moon is about to rise, and it has freed from her prison in the bowels of the earth Mother Malkin (Julianne Moore), a powerful witch-queen who immediately sets to gathering her army, in order to use the power of the full blood moon to take over the world. But Thomas is a poor study, and he's far more interested in flirting with the mysterious Alice (Alicia Vikander) than do anything else, not suspecting (and probably not caring) that she's Malkin's niece and spy.

That's boring and overdone, sure, but nothing about that necessarily has to be very bad. That only creeps in because, for as much fun as Bridges is plainly having, and as ambitious and complex as Ferretti's sets go - and what the hell, let's throw Jacqueline West and her inventive Middle Ages BDSM couture for the witches - there's not another human soul involved besides those three who has anything but disinterest in the film they're all making. This is patently obvious with even a slight glance at the cast: given a chewy, flashy villain that should make for some splendid hamminess, Moore can barely be bothered to do more than spit out her overblown lines about being Evil and blood-this and blood-that; the CGI dragon she transforms into has infinitely more personality. Vikander can barely contain her disinterest in Barnes, who mistakes keeping his eyes very wide open for being innocent and overawed. Olivia Williams, in the thanklessly small role as Thomas's mother, puts in some effort to bring human warmth to the proceedings, but the proceedings do not want that, and spit her right back out.

The rot goes much deeper, though, all the way to the screenplay adapted by Charles Leavitt, Steven Knight, and Matt Greenberg from the first in a series of children's novels (there does not seem to be much of a fear that Seventh Son will end up sparking a franchise). In a stripped-down form, it seems perfectly, fine, but the way that the story ends up functioning as an aimless tour through underdeveloped aspects of its world proves to be a bit dispiriting; the effect isn't a Tolkienesque vistas-beyond-vistas feeling in which untold stories lurk behind every rock, but the sense that the writers kept throwing in unnecessary details to keep themselves from being bored. The central - in some ways, film-defining - relationship between Thomas and Alice is painfully underdeveloped, leaving an enormous hole that nothing could possibly fill.

Meanwhile, Sergei Bodrov directs with listless slack that benefits nothing and no-one other than Bridges, Marco Beltrami's score drones on in a generic fantasy mode, and Newton Thomas Sigel shoots everything in a rainy palette that almost gives a sense of dour gravity to the film, except that it lacks the dramatic weight to support that. It's outrageously dumb, reductive, and lazy, more boring than bad - but it is aggressively boring. Aye, Bridges comes along and gives exactly the right perversity to make things fun in a dippy, loopy way, and so the aggregate effect of Seventh Son is not, in fact, boredom. But it should take more than one actor trying to blow a movie up from the inside to make it worth watching.

3/10

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BDSM WEEK: GETTING BOSSED AROUND

Returning to Secretary more than a decade after it was new, my first reaction has nothing to do with its content or story, but is one of rampant nostalgia: remember when we had indie movies like this? Because I had, in all honesty, kind of forgotten. Such a marvelous age, the late 1990s and early 2000s, when there were films made with the acerbic humor and in-your-face depictions and muted but absolutely distinctive style that director Steven Shainberg and his team played around with here. Secretary is a film told as much by where its camera is placed and what objects we see within it as by the explicit events of Erin Cressida Wilson's screenplay, which are anyway not very explicit - it is a film that shows a lot and tells much less, leaving us to piece together character motivations and interiority through implicit details. It's a film that assumes a fully engaged, adult audience, basically, and it came from a long-ago period when a Sundance-pedigreed movie could unthinkingly expect to have that audience show up. 13 whole years! Anyway, it leaves Secretary feeling awfully smart and engaging in ways that I, for one, had long since forgotten to hope for when wading through the realm of quirky little slice-of-life dramas made outside the studio system.

Secretary opens with a beat that immediately establishes the gravely dry tone of its comedy going forward, and gives us a big fat question to watch solved: a woman, who we'll eventually learn is Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal, in her breakthrough role), marches up to a desk, her arms pinioned in a restraining brace, and proceeds to staple documents together quite without any apparent response to her unique situation. We then slam back 6 months to find a very different Lee, who seems totally impossible to square with the unflappable one we just meet. This Lee is painfully restrained and small, still kept at the emotional level of a girl (ballerinas and pink art direction haunt her in the early scenes), barely even able to commit to the voice-over with which she meekly presents her backstory. She's just out of "the institution", where she was treated as a suicide risk; the film elusively lets us know that she has no such impulse, and that she simply messed up during what was an otherwise perfectly routine attempt to cut herself with a kitchen knife while her mother isn't looking.

One of the greatest strengths of Secretary's strong script is that it never tries to explain Lee's behavior, allowing us to make whatever assumptions about her tragic or not backstory that we care to. Really, the only thing that matters about her self-abuse - which includes holding hot kettles against her leg, in addition to bleeding herself on whatever sharp object is handy - is that she herself doesn't seem tremendously reflective about it, operating out of a kind of dull autopilot to go along with the cloistered, unhappy family life she's stuck in, with people who only notice her much when they force themselves to, trapped in their own agonies otherwise.

It's when Lee takes a job as a secretary for the slippery lawyer E. Edward Grey (James Spader, the most obvious choice in the English-speaking world for this role, but no less effective), that Secretary launches its attention-grabbing central conceit: the submissive, self-abnegating Lee fits perfectly with Grey's own need to dominate and dictate and control. Instead of forming the kind of hate-filled abusive boss-employee relationship that most of us would make out of that situation, the two begin an erotically-charged relationship of domination and sadomasochism, right in the middle of the workplace.

Minor miracles abound in Secretary: one is that it manages to fashion itself as a story of two broken people finding a connection with each other that doesn't in any way suggest that their brokenness is responsible their colorful sexual tastes. Another is that it works, above all things, as a study of how two different personality types interact with each other without giving either actor explicit material to build a character from: Gyllenhaal, because Lee is inherently too quiet and receding to put much of herself out in the open, and Spader, because Grey is seen, in the film, entirely through the lens of Lee's perceptions, and he remains mystifying to her for much of the running time. Both actors nonetheless turn out extraordinary performances, quite possibly the best in both of their respective careers (a claim I'm slightly more eager to make for Gyllenhaal than for Spader). For both of them, the character is based in the feeling of being "off", not quite connected to anyone around them, and unable to express themselves. While virtually everything about Secretary is appealingly non-judgmental and matter-of-fact, the most progressive thing about it is perhaps the way that it positions Lee and Grey's BDSM activities as the way they express themselves and communicate with each other and find meaning in each other, one of the few times that sexual activity has been depicted in the movies as an extension of self with such generosity by the filmmakers.

With the screenplay deliberately providing a fragmentary understanding of the characters and scenario, the film makes us work for it; but it also makes the filmmakers work for it. Considering what it is, it's a little shocking how visual Secretary is, using an unexpectedly constrained color palette - purples and browns, nobody's first idea of two shades that belong together - with squared-off spaces and design elements, both of which give the film a contained, limited feeling that makes it intimate and also a bit pinching. The precise attitude of its main character, in other words, and for a low-budget film with such an obvious narrative hook to allow its mise en scène such prominence in building mood and shaping the development of Lee's arc is even more impressive than it was in 2002. It's so successfully controlled and limiting that when it allows a blast of red - a color used with incredible care throughout the movie - it's as startling and intense to us as it is to Lee.

Anything that works this hard at being a great character portrait is going to eventually have to deal with the gnarly issue of its story, and this is the point where Secretary fumbles. The film's last quarter, or near enough to it, starts amping up needlessly complications and out-of-nowhere melodrama, and it feels like a bit of a betrayal of the effortless littleness that dominates the film up to that point. Speed up Gyllenhaal's line deliveries and have any score less pensive than the one Angelo Badalementi provided, and the final quarter of Secretary could easily have come from one of those loud and daffy British working class comedies that were starting to die off right when this film was new. And what would be fine there is wildly out of tune here, so even as the film finds a sweet footing for its very final scenes, it has hopelessly mangled the spell of what went before.

But still, what went before is absolutely terrific, tight, and focused filmmaking. The movies of the early-'00s have not, as a class, remained in the general popular consciousness very well, and better films than Secretary from 2002 (a strong year for American filmmaking) have been obscured just as much as this one seems to have been. But 13 years is not so long, and with a little luck and care, perhaps this shall be able to regain its rightful spot as an effective, smart example of a breed of movie that didn't survive much past the year of its release.

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REVIEWING THE BEST PICTURES - VOTE!

I like to celebrate the Oscars by reviewing a former Best Picture winner, and sometimes I also like to do it by throwing out a poll to have you help me pick the one I should re-watch. This year, I decided to have a bit of fun: for each of this year's eight nominees, I've picked a previous winner that reminds me of it in some way. And those are the eight films I'm letting you select between. The sick irony of one of my favorite current contenders being paired with one of the worst winners of all time has not been lost on me.

The Nominees:

American Sniper:
The career of a controversial real-life American war hero = Patton (1970)

Birdman:
Catty critics and professional terror on the New York stage = All About Eve (1950)

Boyhood:
One family quietly changes over time = Cavalcade (1932/33)

The Grand Budapest Hotel:
An all-star cast at a grand hotel = Grand Hotel (1931/32)

The Imitation Game:
On the home front, Brits do what they can to help during the Second World War = Mrs. Miniver (1942)

Selma:
A great man whose passionate life fundamentally changed the course of history = Gandhi (1982)

The Theory of Everything:
The life of a famous Englishman, filtered through his relationship with a woman = Shakespeare in Love (1998)

Whiplash:
A music-driven tale of a protégé trying to please a repugnant, bullying mentor = My Fair Lady (1964)

I'm feeling expansive, and I'm pretty certain I already know what's going to win, so I'm going to commit to reviewing the top two vote-getters. Which means that I'm going to let y'all have two votes, as well.




Voting closes Sunday, 15 February at midnight CST, so I have time to secure copies of the winners. The reviews are coming Oscar weekend, 21 and 22 February.

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