As seen on screen (1)
05 March 2006. Inspired by this month's viewing.
I've recently started a new gig, writing about obscure new cinema for the local Time-Outy magazine. For shits, giggles and screenings, mostly. If you're into arty sex and cartoon samarais, you can read my first column below.
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Sex isn't what it used to be. Five years ago, I interviewed Patrice Chereau, the director of the French/British film Intimacy, while he was on the receiving end of prudish outrage for showing Mark Rylance's erect penis in his film. Like Rylance, the censors left the film uncut, and the resulting hoo-hah, also like Rylance, was totally out of proportion.
"People are not clear about sex at all," Chereau said at the time. "Sex is a problem that you cannot face easily, because people are so scared. We are more repressed than we think." That was then, but now, thanks in part perhaps to the arrival of the worldwide interpornweb, sex seems to be going down better than ever. What was once taboo now passes almost without comment in literature, Big Brother and on the cover of Interviu, that marvellous magazine that manages to put headlines like "THE SCANDAL OF OUR INHUMANE PRISONS" next to a nice pair of breasts on the cover.
A juicy threesome of new films out this month in Spain present their own take on kinky sex under the banner of 'arthouse'. The Canadian film Lie with me and the Italian production Melissa P. are both based on randy books, and both concern oversexed and abnormally attractive nymphomaniac women (in the case of the latter, a teenager), trying to enjoy their bodies and not to fall in love. The other film, Lifting de corazón, is an Argentinian/Spanish production about a married man who has a passionate affair with his assistant, and is then forced to choose between happily married life and some great rumpy-pumpy. All three films try to say something meaningful about the pleasures of the flesh, and how complicated it can be once you've pulled back on your clothes.
It's that last part that differentiates the hand-drawn posters of Callao's Cine Capitol with those of Tirso de Molina's Sala X. The production values, narrative, acting quality and viewing public of the films shown at those two classic Madrid cinemas couldn't be more different. But in other ways, it's all the same: films sold using the allure of sex, acted out on screen by performers who are following the unheard-by-us directions of an inventive voyeur behind the camera. Be it Lie with Me or Hot Assphalt 3, the titillation is the same. Even if arthouse is only supposed to make you stroke your chin while watching it.
Of the three films released, the one most likely to get attention is Melissa P., because it's based on the supposedly true diaries of a Sicilian teenager, published in English as 'A Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed' - a book that caused an almighty fuss in Catholic, patriarchal Italy. The fuss wasn't so much over the subject matter as the idea that it was a true depiction of teenage lust. A similar elephant was ousted from his corner in the UK over the diaries of London call girl Belle de Jour. It's all very well to write something believable about a woman having sex with multiple partners - but heaven forbid it should actually be written by a woman, and, worse, happen to be true.
Sex has indeed changed a lot in the last ten years. You can show us almost anything these days - just please don't make us think that it could actually happen.
Elsewhere, Spain has created a new film genre: the fake-manga-shameless-tourist-promotion-samurai-starring children's animation. That's about where the creativity ends, because Gisaku is an unintentionally hilarious attempt, funded by the Spanish tourist board, to product-place Spain in a naff children's cartoon. It's actually worth seeing just for the comedy of seeing the script try to shoehorn the skyscraper of its client's wishlist into the matchbox of a plot. "This is nice wine." "Yes, did I mention that it's from just one of Spain's 60 different wine regions, producing some of the finest wines in the world?"; "What was that?" "Why, that's the AVE, the high-tech train that connects all of Spain in a matter of hours."
The story, if you can call it that, requires our heroes to visit the Sagrada Familia, the Bernabeu (where Real Madrid just happen to be playing Barcelona), Santiago de Compostela, Toledo... It's like a dull geography lesson from a teacher who thinks he's down with the kids. By the time the samurai opens his own tapas bar at the end, I was left wondering if the makers had some kind of facial deformity that completely prevents their tongues from reaching their cheeks. Worth it just to give a round of applause to the designer who accidentally left the Madrid 2012 Olympic Bid poster in the background of one of the scenes. Give me meaningless sex any day.
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