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I want your sex >> Montreal's screens get a mixed erotic message this week by MATTHEW HAYS
Now Brit indie filmmaker Stuart Urban has made Preaching to the Perverted, and he reportedly went to great lengths to find out about the details, the nuances, the ambience of the smack-me-and-love-me scene. The results of Urban's efforts, while visually stimulating, would be far more powerful if he knew anything about pacing, dialogue and character development. The slight plot of Preaching to the Perverted involves a young Christian man who is desperate to climb the ranks of parliament. He takes a job with a moral-majority type MP, who is intent on infiltrating a local S&M club to bust the place down. The uptight MP sends the young Christian in undercover to find out all about the dirt. Convenient conflict is supplied when (surprise!) the Christian finds himself somewhat infatuated with the club's dominatrix. He tries to get her to clean up her act, she tries to dirty him down, initiating him into the wonderful, horrible world of S&M kink. The inevitable scenarios ensue. Though the Brits have scored some important international cred this past year with the critical and box-office success of The Full Monty, they're going to shed the cred really fast if they export any more movies like this. Despite all its slutty wrapping, Preaching to the Perverted barely hides a simplistic and rather dreary romance, one that ends with predictable results. Don't be fooled by appearances--there's nothing too hip, witty or clever about this movie. I'd say it felt like a slap in the face, but that would be giving it too much credit. A welcome antidote to the erotic posing of Preaching to the Perverted is the excellent film series put together by the folks at the Cinémathèque québécoise, titled Érotisme(s). The curators of the anthology have included such brilliant must-be-seen-on-the-big-screen fare as Buñuel's Belle de jour (starring Catherine Deneuve), Josef Von Sternberg's The Blue Angel and Blonde Venus (Marlene Dietrich), Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (Brando) and Almodovar's High Heels. Also of note is Fritz the Cat, Ralph Bakshi's hilarious riff on Robert Crumb's cartoon creation of the same name. This was the first feature-length X-rated cartoon, and while it won over a lot of fans, Crumb was apparently so put off by Bakshi's interpretation of the Fritz character that Crumb disowned him. And for those who've never seen it, essential screening comes with Dusan Makavejev's W.R. Mysteries of the Organism, undoubtedly one of the strangest, most disturbingly hallucinatory movie experiences anyone will ever have. Makavejev makes the argument that political revolution can't come without sexual revolution. No substances necessary to watch this one--just come as you are. Canadians haven't been left out of the orgy: Cronenberg's Crash and Egoyan's Exotica are also part of the series. Preaching to the Perverted opens this Friday, May 8. Érotisme(s) is now playing at the Cinémathèque québécoise until the end of June. See film listings for showtimes
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Fetish culture has a pretty bad track record in the movies. Filmmakers set out to represent it in all its glory, and end up somehow making it seem entirely vanilla. Remember Exit to Eden? You probably don't, seeing as it flopped pretty badly. It was the Rosie O'Donnell-Dan Aykroyd-Iman vehicle about an S&M resort, and boy did the movie suck, in large part because of its unfaithful representations of the S&M crowd.