Tag Archives: Sadomasochism

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CAPSULE: THE GIRL ON A MOTORCYCLE (1968)

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DIRECTED BY: Jack Cardiff

FEATURING: , Alain Delon, Roger Mutton, Marius Goring

PLOT: The newly married Rebecca (Marianne Faithfull) absconds from her marriage bed and rides her motorcycle to meet her lover.

Still from Girl on a Motorcycle (1968)

COMMENTS: Rated X and released in 1968, The Girl on a Motorcycle wants to be a lot of things: erotic, trippy, rebellious, and philosophical, as well as a sex kitten vehicle for pop star Marianne Faithfull. But most of all, it wants to be a motorcycle movie about free love. Complicating matters, it’s also about S&M.

Girl was adapted, shot, and directed by Jack Cardiff, the foremost British cinematographer of the day. Cardiff used inventive (at the time) methods to shoot said girl on said motorcycle: rear projection, bike strapped to a flatbed, and, for mid-to-long shots, using professional motorcyclist Bill Ivy as a stand in. None of these are very convincing though, which is unfortunate since great swaths of the movie focus on Rebecca (Marianne Faithfull) on her bike while we hear her thoughts in voiceover.

The content of the voiceover doesn’t help the movie’s cause much either. Most of it is Rebecca pining ecstatically for her lover. Other parts seem like outright pandering to the youth, e.g., “Rebellion is the only thing that keeps you alive.”

This voiceover track plays while newlywed Rebecca rides through the French countryside clad only in a leather catsuit (hence the name of the American release, Naked Under Leather). Her motorcycle was a wedding gift from her lover, Daniel (Alain Delon). During this extended ride—which in reality would only take a couple of hours—she has plenty of time to ruminate about how square her husband is, how superior free love is, how marriage will soon be a thing of the past, and how great a lover Daniel is. Oh, and how much she loves her motorcycle. (Loves like Titane loves that Cadillac Coupe DeVille.)

Ostensibly, the ride is to take her to Daniel, a pretentious philosophy professor who treats her poorly and at times violently. But a lot happens along the way, including a psychedelic dream sequence, a psychedelic road trip montage, and a few psychedelic sex scenes.

During one stop along the road to writhe in grass, Rebecca is passed and leered at by a military convoy, which leads her to rant about how joining the military proves you hate your own freedom and likely have never had sex and probably can’t. This is a weird and jarring separation from the theme of the movie and sticks out as another attempt to pander to the youth of the day.

Other scenes also stand out as odd. In the very beginning there is a dream sequence in which Rebecca and Daniel are psychedelically going at it but are abruptly interrupted by clown faces. The husband plays cello in the center ring of a circus while Rebecca stands balanced on a moving motorcycle and Daniel, the ringleader, whips pieces of her one-piece leather suit off of her.

Another odd scene shows Rebecca contemplating a gray, straight-lined gas station. She’s complaining about it as a symbol of a society with no freedom (we get it already!) when an attendant in a bright orange jumpsuit comes out. At the sight of him, she freaks out—mouth open, trembling—and drives away.

Let’s not forget the post-coital motocross highlight reel.

Sadomasochism is never overtly mentioned, but Rebecca is choked and whipped and flogged with roses. Late in the movie, she realizes what she has with Daniel is not free love. She is attached to him and loves the control he exerts over her.

After sitting in a German café weighing her husband—a kind man who loves her but is boring—against Daniel—a cold man who doesn’t love her but is exciting—she chooses Daniel again. Riding off in an ecstatic state (facilitated by the vibrations of her motorcycle), the inevitable happens—inevitable in any ‘60s film about free love and motorcycles: a fiery crash. Less predictable is the helicopter pullback from the crash, at least a year before Easy Rider.

What makes this film truly unique is its audacity in continuously showing Faithfull over-emoting on a bike she isn’t riding. Nevertheless, as a vehicle to turn her into a sex symbol, it worked. Full-frontal nudity will do that.

Girl isn’t a good movie, but for viewers who appreciate kitschy ‘60s exploitation, it’s not a bad way to spend 91 minutes.

In 2023, Kino upgraded their Girl on a Motorcycle DVD to Blu-ray for the first time. It ports over Cardiff’s original commentary track from the DVD and adds an alternate commentary from film critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, who analyzes the film through a feminist lens.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A countercultural curio of almost painterly beauty…”–Joseph Jon Lanthier and Budd Wilkins, Slant (Blu-ray)

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CAPSULE: LOVE RITES (1987)

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Cérémonie d’amour; AKA Queen of the Night

DIRECTED BY: Walerian Borowczyk

FEATURING: ,

PLOT: A man pursues a prostitute he meets on a train into a web of sadomasochistic mystery.

Still from Love Rites (1987)

COMMENTS: If you’re visiting this site, there’s a good chance that you’ve heard of Walerian Borowczyk, the brilliant Polish animator turned art-house pornographer. Much has been made of his infamous fall from grace, which began with 1973’s unsettling and twisted Immoral Tales and hit a spectacular climax with 1975’s  The Beast [La Bête], a Baroque passion play of bestiality that flew in the face of all accepted standards of good taste, and left Borowczyk to wander the wilderness making low-budget schlock for the rest of his days.

Or so the story goes. I can’t speak for the rest of Borowczyk’s work after The Beast, but Love Rites, which turned out to be his last film, finds his eccentric brand of perversion still intact, just a bit mellowed by age. A middle-aged clothing buyer, Hugo (Mathieu Carrière) pursues a clandestine affair with Miriam (Marina Pierro), a mysterious prostitute whom he encounters on a subway. After a game of cat-and-mouse and a lengthy conversation about poetry and acting shouted across opposite sides of a train platform, the two lovers take refuge in a church before making their way to a secret boudoir for an afternoon of sexual domination and submission.

From that description, you might wonder about this movie’s weird credentials. Indeed, on the surface, this is little more than a stereotypical French erotic drama, with the first half of the film’s brief running time devoted to tedious intellectual monologues veering between philosophy, religion, and deadpan tales of past sexual abuse–all of which are apparently intended to be titillating overtures for the real action which is surely lurking just around the corner. After all, don’t forget that The Beast begins in much the same way, with a good 45 minutes devoted to a glorified period soap opera with occasional insinuations of a beastly secret that eventually pays off in a big way.

There’s a troubling development here though, away from the cinematic and towards the literary. Once we enter the boudoir of Miriam’s ominous “friend and mentor,” more and more of the action becomes relegated to a narrator—to the point that most of the juicy stuff that Borowczyk is famous for is hidden off-screen. With sophisticated relish, the narrator relates the sordid events taking place just out of view, as if reading from the works of the Marquis de Sade for an audience of horny aristocrats. The action is hidden from view with compositions designed just as tastefully as the narration is blunt and smutty, with visual motifs evoking cages, butterflies and birds. As the action builds into a fever dream of emasculation and perversion, the narration gradually diminishes, eventually disappearing completely as the film reaches its head-scratching denouement.

But while the film’s muted tone can be both frustrating and boring, there’s no denying that Love Rites is pure Borowczyk. Libertine perversion pervades the film, despite its attempts to hide these qualities from view. If Borowczyk’s intention was to deny the audience’s desire for easy erotic payoffs in lieu of something more esoteric, he succeeded. What’s happening out of view, in the margins, remains perpetually out of our grasp. Who is the unseen madame who demands that games of submission be played in her boudoir? What about the mute Cambodian slave who could appear at any second to carry out some inconceivable orgy of torture?

Alas, Borowczyk is not about to give us the answers to these questions, much like Miriam, who teases her male prey with promises of erotic fulfillment but then confounds her client’s expectations, eventually turning the tables and leaving poor Hugo with more questions than answers. For those who enjoy such esoteric mind games, Love Rites might be just what you’ve been looking for. And for Borowczyk historians, the new Blu-ray release from Kino-Lorber offers the uncut theatrical version as well as a shorter director’s cut that cuts some of the flack from the film’s first half (which is chock full of it). But if you’re new to Borowczyk, you might be better served by checking out his earlier, more infamous films, and then streaming this one as an epilogue.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an object lesson in creating a surrealist work of art. The 1987 film exhibits an exacting preoccupation with the specificities of places and objects, while at the same time remaining open to spontaneity.”–Budd Wilkins, Slant (Blu-ray)

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CAPSULE: LITTLE DEATHS (2011)

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DIRECTED BY: Sean Hogan, Andrew Parkinson,

FEATURING: Jodie Jameson, Luke de Lacey, Siubhan Harrison, Holly Lucas, Tom Sawyer, Kate Braithwaite

PLOT: Three anthologized shorts: a wealthy couple toys with a homeless girl, an ex-junkie and ex-prostitute joins a pharmaceutical trial, and a young couple’s sadomasochistic relationship turns sour.

Still from Little Deaths (2011)

COMMENTS: For weird purposes, we can dispose of two of the three sexually-charged horrors that make up Little Deaths quickly. The opener, “House & Home,” is a well-produced but obvious R-rated “Twilight Zone” thing where a couple who exploit homeless women find the tables turned. Even though you might not guess the exact details, the twist is something less than a surprise when it arrives. The closer, “Bitch,” is a bit more involving because of its depiction of unusual fetishes (canine roleplay among them) in the context of a very dysfunctional S&M relationship, and its exceptionally cruel ending. It’s essentially sleazy sex life portraiture, though with a climax that’s equal parts troubling and ridiculous.

That leaves the middle segment, “Mutant Tool,” which is indeed about as weird as its title suggests. The central character is Jen, a recovering junkie and ex-prostitute who’s finding it hard to go straight. Her drug-dealing boyfriend enrolls her in an experimental pharmaceutical treatment with a major side effect: she hallucinates about a strange man (or monster) hanging in a cage. The plot gradually brings an old Nazi experiments and a develops a cyclical pharmaceutical ecosystem somewhat reminiscent of the one in Upstream Color (2013) (if less rigorously developed). The film is visually murky, with only brief glimpses of the dingy mutant behind a face shield and a shower curtain, though the restrained imagery can be effective—and there is one WTF closeup that is both creepy and sort of funny.  The exposition can be a bit clumsy: Jen keeps taking calls from her escort agency, even though she claims to be no longer working for them, just so we can sense the pressure she’s under. And there’s a crusty old caretaker character who keeps coming up with excuses to volunteer mutant backstory to a trainee. Plus, it seems like an awfully bad idea for Frank to refer Jen to Dr. Reese, considering the ghoulish nature of his prior dealings with the physician. Still, if you can overlook those narrative shortcuts, “Mutant Tool” has a strong and weird conceit, and also has the only likeable characters in the triptych—Jen and Frank are lowlifes, sure, but they’re at least trying to escape from the horror rather than hurtling into it like the others.

Although perversity abounds throughout, and “Mutant Tool” perks some interest for seekers of the eerie, none of Little Deaths offerings are essential shock-horror. But at thirty minutes each, none of them outstay their welcome, either.

Little Deaths has been accused of misogyny, and although there’s some basis for the charge (e.g. the uncomfortable verbal lingering over a rape scene), it’s overblown in general. In Little Deaths, people are simply cruel to one another, and males are victims as much as females. The one exception might be that final episode, Rumley’s provocatively-titled “Bitch,” which invites (though doesn’t demand) the misogyny-minded to identify with its emasculated antihero. To their credit, the directors do anticipate these charges and address them in a series of interviews included on the DVD—although Parkinson has nothing to answer for, and Rumley glibly dismisses the objection with a shrug.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…three tales of the strange, the weird, and the fantastic… ‘Mutant Tool’ is Andrew Parkinson’s way-strange contribution… [‘Mutant Tool’] is some pretty weird and (to use the word yet again) ‘dark’ stuff, made all the more so by being played as straight drama…  LITTLE DEATHS as a whole is pleasantly unsettling and worth watching for horror fans on the lookout for something different.”–Porfle Popnecker, “HK and Cult Film News” (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Donatien,” who qualified his recommendation: “i don’t think all three short films can be classified as weird, only the 3rd one.” Maybe he misremembered the order of the tales? Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

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CAPSULE: IMPOSSIBLE MONSTERS (2019)

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DIRECTED BY: Nathan Catucci

FEATURING: Santino Fontana, Devika Bhise, Chris Henry Coffey

PLOT: With the prospect of a juicy grant on the line, a professor needs to keep his project together; the murder of one of his participants complicates this prospect.

COMMENTS: A social worker, a painter, and a dominatrix walk into a sleep study… But that suggests that Impossible Monsters is more interesting than it actually is. It isn’t for want of trying (more on that in the bloated plot paragraph to come). Fulfilling its obligation as a “psychological thriller,” there is a twist; in keeping with the “sleep study” premise, there are a lot of dream sequences (over a dozen by my count); and in homage to the title-inspiring quote, “Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters,” there is plenty of mention of Francisco de Goya. But all the pieces, and there are many, add up to a dense sludge of events that awkwardly drips over the edges of its narrative container, making a mess on the floor.

Rich Freeman (Santino Fontana) is a university professor in New York City, focusing on sleep/dreams/etc., with a deeper focus on “sleep paralysis.” To further aid mankind (and, to a lesser extent, his career), he proposes a study involving three volunteers who will discuss their dreams, keep a dream journal, and in the process have various socio-emotio-sexual interactions with each other. Meanwhile, Freeman’s friend/adversary Doctor Engle is busy cheating on his wife with one of Freeman’s students, Jo (Devika Bhise), a self-described “sexual pain exploration specialist” (or, “SPES” in the industry jargon). Jo has a crush on Freeman, and is unhappy that Freeman is in a relationship with another of the study’s participants, a young social worker who dreams of starting a non-profit in Albany, N.Y. Freeman’s mentor, who works with veterans suffering from PTSD, wants Freeman to join him and “make a difference” in Albany. The dean of the unspecified university, however, wants the prestige that would accompany the Really Big Grant from some pharmaceutical concern, which somehow hinges solely on Freeman’s work with three subjects. The third person is Otis, a soft-spoken painter who was raised in foster care and may or may not have been raped in his early teens and may or may not have, later, burnt down the home of his foster family, killing them in the process.

I don’t enjoy burning up 230+ words on plot exposition, but a sense of the goings-on is necessary to emphasize the importance of telling a story. Not six or seven stories, and certainly not so many stories crammed into an 84-minute movie. Everything interrelates, of course (and, speaking of relations, the lapse of professional ethics on display in Impossible Monsters is astounding). But if you’ve only got so much time and so much budget, cuts needs must. It wasn’t without its charm–and as someone who lives quite near Albany, I do love it when “Upstate New York” gets mentioned as a glorious place to escape to. But Impossible Monsters is a case of too much narrative flab supported by too little narrative bone and sinew. As such, it never really gets moving.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…at times gets too baroque for its own good, straining for a Ken Russell-like hallucinatory style that it doesn’t fully succeed in pulling off. But it’s an admirably ambitious and accomplished debut for its tyro filmmaker who should easily move on to bigger things.”–Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter (festival screening)

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CAPSULE: NEXT DOOR [NABOER] (2005)

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Naboer

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DIRECTED BY: Pål Sletaune

FEATURING: Kristoffer Joner, Cecilie Mosli, Julia Schacht, Anna Bache-Wiig

PLOT: John has just been dumped by his girlfriend; after he helps his neighbors move a cabinet, he slowly learns that his breakup was not what it seems.

COMMENTS: Once I describe this movie as a psychological thriller, I’m not giving much away when I tell you that yes, there is a twist, and that yes, aficionados of the genre will see it coming. Lucky for me, though, I can be pretty naïve when it comes to watching movies, and so it was a good while into the film before I sussed just what was going on. (It’s a wonder, then, why I don’t watch more thrillers.) Suffice it to say, Next Door is one of those nice little finds that makes no pretense at greatness, but capably gets its job—providing unnerving entertainment—done.

After Ingrid leaves him, John (Kristoffer Joner) is a solitary wreck until he makes the acquaintance of the two (possibly) sisters next door. Anne (Julia Schacht) needs a cabinet moved, and John agrees to help—finding that her apartment is, shall we say, rather lived in, and stocked full of food. He discovers that Anne’s sister Kim (Julia Schacht, channeling a troublingly splintered femme fatale) has recently been sexually assaulted and become agorophobic. John and Kim have a strangely violent sexual encounter in an unsettlingly tidy room tucked away in a labyrinth of corridors in the apartment’s deep recesses. John feels guilty for his violent responses to Kim’s violent flirtations, and slowly begins to realize that his life hasn’t quite been going exactly as he’s opted to remember it.

The exact term I’m looking for to describe this film evades me, but I’ll go with the phrase “character movie.” Like a character actor, Next Door is not aiming for lofty accolades or fame, but is doing the good work of being entertaining, memorable, and not overstaying its welcome. (The runtime is a mere 75 minutes.) Pål Sletaune, who also wrote the script, has crafted a clean and confusing chamber drama that breaks no new ground, but hits all the correct notes: unreliable story-telling, charismatic leads, and, this being an adult thriller, enough unsettling sex to convey an aura of carnal tension without becoming tawdry. Interestingly enough, this movie was picked up by TLA Releasing, an outfit that primarily distributes LGBT films. With this, it would seem they also cater to the BDSM crowd. You’ve been warned.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…bizarre head-scratcher…”–Jeffrey M. Anderson, Combustible Celluloid (DVD)

(This movie was nominated for review by Gerardo. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)