BEFORE: Yeah, I definitely peaked too soon on the Valentine's Day thing. To use a painting metaphor, with the Shakespeare films I was kind of stripping away the old paint from the previous chain, and then with the screwball comedies I sort of laid down a coat of primer. "Breakfast at Tiffany's" was a decent enough top coat, and then "The Notebook" presented a beautiful mural of love and devotion over that. Now that mural is barely even dry, and I'm going to start chipping away at it. The next week or so of movies will still be romances, but will tend more toward lies, heartbreak, infidelity and deception. And all that BEFORE I get to the Woody Allen films.
Linking from "The Vow", Channing Tatum was also in "Havoc" with Laura San Giacomo (last seen in "Once Around"). I must have some other link in mind when I set this one up, but I'll be damned if I can find it again.
THE PLOT: A sexually repressed woman's husband is having an affair with her sister. The arrival of a visitor with a rather unusual fetish changes everything.
AFTER: And, once again we've got a female character who is an artist - that's three in a row if you're scoring at home. Which makes my painting metaphor really timely...
But, I'm finally getting to this film, which won the Sundance Audience Award in 1989, and killed at the 1990 Golden Globes. Look, I've been busy, OK? Who knew Steven Soderbergh would go on to make such great movies, like um, (hold on a sec...) like "Erin Brokovich" and "Ocean's Eleven"! Not to mention "Traffic" and "Contagion"!
This is early, early Soderbergh. I can see bad director habits, like crossing the axis. Practically the first thing they taught us in film school was to never cross the axis. In any scene between two people, you have to imagine a line between them, and you can put the camera anywhere on one side of that line, or even on the line itself, but you can't cut to a position on the other side, or the two people will appear to have suddenly switched places. You see this a lot when two people are in a car, and they use that establishing shot through the front windshield. Then they can cut to a close-up of each person, but the camera needs to stay on the near side of that imaginary axis. If you cut to a shot from the back seat, the driver will now be on the right and the passenger will be on the left, and this could be visually confusing. That axis gets crossed a lot in this film.
But let's move on to the subject matter. This is another love-triangle film that eventually turns into a quadrangle, when a husband's college friend comes to town. He's got a very specific kink, after a relationship ended badly he's only able to get excited by interviewing women about their sexual habits, who they've slept with and when, and basically how they get off, which is the thing that gets him off.
ASIDE: Another thing I remember about film school - whenever someone wanted to bad-mouth a film, or decry the fact that a film had no point, instead of saying that the film was pointless, female NYU students would tend to say, "Well, this film is just masturbation!" And I would sit in the class and think, "Well, what's wrong with masturbation?" Why are the girls saying that like it's a negative thing? As Woody Allen once quipped, "Don't knock masturbation. It's sex with someone I love."
Self-pleasure for men has been around since Biblical times - what most people don't realize about female masturbation, though, is that it wasn't invented until around 1879, I think by Susan B. Anthony. (EDIT: OK, I admit I'm off by a few years here. Clearly it was invented during the Civil War, because all those war widows needed to do something to keep their spirits up.) It's kind of like how the tin can was invented in 1772 but nobody thought to invent the can opener until 1855. (Why did people keep putting food in cans for 80 years if they couldn't access it?) But since women are the fairer sex, they were all too embarrassed to talk about it until the mid-1970's. That's when Cosmopolitan magazine allowed them all to realize that other women were doing it too. I kid, but it's kind of true.
We see the lead character here in conversations with her therapist, and though she admits trying it once, she also felt really stupid doing it, so we can assume that she doesn't really see the point. And since her husband is sleeping with her sister, it's tough to say whether the affair happened because of her disinterest in sex, or whether her disinterest in sex comes from dissatisfaction with her husband, or perhaps knowing, on some level, that he's cheating. Kind of a chicken vs. egg sort of thing.
This is all about the mechanics of marriage, and when people have been married for a while, a couple of different things might happen. They could fall into a routine where sex just isn't part of the picture, or more likely this could happen to one of them and not the other. The other partner might then seek out an affair if they don't have another sexual outlet - this is where the benefits of self-pleasure really come into play.
But for a lot of people, the physicality of sex and the mental stimulation and the emotional intimacy are all tied together. It gets confusing when people get these itches scratched from different sources. The review I just read of this film talks about "skeletons in the closet" and "self-destruction" but I think that over-simplifies things and really ends up missing the mark.
Ann no longer is interested in the physical part of sex, but she wants to remain married for the emotional intimacy. Which is fine, except that she's being lied to, so in the end she doesn't even have that. Her husband wants to have all three things too, which is typical human nature, but he's just getting the physical stimulation from one woman, and the emotional intimacy from another. And Graham no longer has the need for the physical aspect, so he gets the mental stimulation and emotional intimacy from interviewing the women that he meets. (and by watching videotapes - a condition commonly called "Ejectile Disfunction") Ann and Graham are actually a better match when you break it down this way, but it takes them a while to realize this.
I think this film might have been quite ground-breaking in its day, but unfortunately by now it's old hat. Compared to what you might see on the internet, or read about in "50 Shades of Grey", it now seems quite tame. I feel like it's lost quite a bit of whatever shock value it once had.
Also starring Andie MacDowell (last seen in "Muppets From Space"), Peter Gallagher (last seen in "The Hudsucker Proxy"), James Spader (last seen in "Lincoln").
RATING: 4 out of 10 glasses of ice tea
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