EROTIQUE
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1994 Frank Maloney
EROTIQUE is an anthology film by three directors, Lizzie Borden, Monika Treut, and Clara Law. The casts of their three short films include Kamala Lopez-Dawson, Bryan Cranston, Priscilla Barnes, Camilla Soeberg, Tim Lounibos, and Hayley Man.
EROTIQUE received its world premiere at the Seattle International Film Festival and I understand is booked to return to Seattle later this year (in fact I saw a trailer for it last night when I went to KIKA). Frankly, the fact that EROTIQUE has found a distributor and bookings surprises me because the film is so uneven overall. The first part has the best story; the second has the highest kink contents; the third part looks like outtakes from a much longer film.
"Let's Talk About Sex" is directed by Lizzie Borden and written by Borden and Susie Bright. In it, Kamala Lopez-Dawson is an aspiring actress who is being offered only humiliating roles of hookers and barmaids who have a sex scene and then never heard of again, because she's not blonde and anglo. She supports herself by working in a phone-sex boiler room. She rebels against having the same, blonde-big hooter fantasies imposed on her by customers until she finds one (Bryan Cranston) who want to hear her sexual fantasies. The final upshot of this is a surprising and sexy last scene meeting between the two. The scenes in the boiler room, the women who work the phones and the johns, the man who goads them on to keep the suckers on the line, and calls they handle are hilarious and interesting. The fantasy sequences demonstrate why it is probably imprudent to talk about sexual fantasies to strangers, but the interactions and growing telephonic intimacy between Lopez-Dawson and Cranston is sexy and intriguing. Overall, this the best segment.
"Taboo Parlor," directed by Monika Treut, involves two drop-dead lesbians (Priscilla Barnes and Camilla Soeberg), the younger of whom has yen for seducing men from time to time. They go to a ship-board nightclub in the Hamburg docks (look for Marianne Sagebrecht as the dance mistress) and find a particularly dangerous stud to take home. The three-way develops in a direction that surprises him and us, but him more finally. In the end, the whole smacks a little of the evil lesbian of pulp homophobic literature and left me uncomfortable and not a little puzzled, but the sex was erotic and something of a turn-on, if that was the point because it was pretty hard to find a point to this film.
"Wonton Soup," directed by Clara Law and set in Hong Kong, is the story of a Chinese-Australian (Tim Lounibos) who is persuaded to return to his cultural roots and ancient Chinese sexual techniques to win back his lover (Hayley Man). The scene where they work their way their the manual is hilarious, but the rest of it is undeveloped and fragmentary at best (interestingly, in the trailer there is scene from this story that is not in the released version I saw). And as the last part of EROTIQUE, it makes one exit with a decidedly negative impression of the entire work.
I cannot really recommend EROTIQUE, even though some of its parts are stimulating in one way or the other.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney
.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews