Rating: 8/10
Wandering into the screening room of the Museum of the Moving Image on a Sunday afternoon to see Colette Buron's Coming Soon was tinged with a kind of pornographic guilt. The movie was billed in the museum's door sheet as a "teen sex comedy" which had been having trouble with ratings and distributors alike for its frank dealings with female sexuality, and specifically female orgasm. That, coupled with the pamphlet's admission that it was Burson's first feature (she's both written and directed), could leave one wondering whether it wasn't actually some soft-core art-house uber-feminist film - but it was the politics that drew me into the theater. And the politics turned out to be very interesting indeed, because these fearful ideas, created by no less an arbiter of American culture than the Motion Picture Association of America, could not have been more wrong.
Not that I was surprised.
Slick and polished from start to finish, this movie was a well cast, superbly acted, nicely scored and adequately shot commercial teen flick. Every inch of the film gleamed in expectation of the mall cinemas all over the nation that it was about to visit. And perfectly well should have; this is a funny, clever, innocent movie which couldn't conceive of exploiting either its actors or its audience. There is no violence (of course!), no nudity, and this might, in fact, be the first "teen sex comedy" (think Porky's, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, or American Pie) to even avoid gratuitous gutter language without losing its authenticity.
What Coming Soon manages to do is keep its balance - and there is a lot to keep in the air; lesser filmmakers could have (assuming they could have undertaken to make a teen sex comedy for girls in the first place) let it degenerate into schoolyard feminism, or worse, a kind of PC boosterism. They might have let it become too serious to be funny, or too funny to get its point accross. Instead, the movie manages to be frank about its message - which is casting light on the (even now) obscured corners of a very positive modern female sexuality - without belaboring it, and to stay funny without alienating anyone; young or old, male or female. A startling feat.
Capable of handling endurable high school romance, frank display of a female orgasm, and sharp but ultimately innocent mockery of every sexual cliche (acknowledged and unacknowledged), as well as delivering an almost too accurate satire of Manhattan prep schools and their students, the film is a joy and a relief, single-handedly elevating its genre. No cracks show; Bonnie Root is charming as the protagonist and outsider, and Mia Farrow lays down the perfect amount of comic absurdity, clearly getting both the form and function of the script. There are even hints of genius in the gaps between the merely clever; in the way the setting compliments the elements of the story (Root's character is wooed by her boyfriend via his music video - and it actually works). The filmmaker, if she can transcend her issue, will have a lot to offer in the future. As it is, America's young adults certainly don't deserve a movie this good.
There are flaws, and they are worth mentioning. Of the three aristocratic high school girls whose plight we follow, one, without any warning other than that she is "miserable," suddenly propositions the female drummer in a club after a friend casually refers to her as a "dyke." You wouldn't say the treatmeant of her sexuality was prefunctory, but the thought might enter your head. Then again, if the filmmakers understood being gay as well as they understood being sexually frustrated and under-informed, it would have been, well, a film about gay kids. Although those are apparently easier to get past the ratings board.
Unquestionably the movie's biggest problem is the one segment of its audience it apparently _does_ alienate; 40-60 year old white male fathers of 14-18 year old daughters. Widely regarded as the demographic that runs the world, it is apparently also worth regarding for a kind of absurd latent sexism - a prurience that apparently cannot bend enough to acknowledge the female's positive role in the female orgasm. And unfortunately, even a movie as unselfconsciously diplomatic and fair to both men, and their establishment, as this one, can become a target.
Burson described, after the screening (which was of the unexpurgated, "NC-17" version of her film), her plight with the MPAA ratings board, which, as they relentlessly red flagged every scene in her movie which related to its central thesis, had simultaneously passed, quietly and effortlessly, an R rating to another movie which some of you may remember, a snuff film exploitation movie from the producers of Seven, called 8MM. Burson, meanwhile, is reduced to slash and burn editing, not to mention inserting dreck lines such as "We're _so_ eighteen" in order to garner a rating low enough to give her movie a chance at seeing the light of day.
But again, this came as no surprise to me, a New Yorker who'se been here long enough to remember when this was still officially a Scary Town. It's still true; you sow what you reap. The censors, both instutional and in the offices of Fox, Paramount, Sony, and the rest, have been sowing for quite a while. Colette Burson, however, is a certified Good Sign. In time the establishment will, hopefully, come around. Even their immediate successors might, perhaps, feel a little mortified at stifling what was not only a good movie, but a wonderful message. Selfishly, as film lovers, we just hope the director isn't martyred for the cause.
URL: http://www.comingsoonmovie.com
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