Cinema

High porn

Clancy Sigal

_Immoral Tales (Filmcenta, ABC BaYswater, Islington Screen) The Seven Per Cent Solution (Plaza) 'Erotica is a peculiar word. The OED defines it thus: 'Of or pertaining to the sexual passion, treating of love . . .' But, as commonly used in the film business nowadays, it really means a very one-sided tileatment of women's images by male directors and photographers in which the allegedly erotic kick arises from putting women through the most dehumanising Paces in the name of 'love' or a half-cocked s.alute to some sort of pretentious concept of liberation. Though there may be exceptions, I c, annot remember ever having seen an erotic,

s film which did not, in some gross or ubtle way, degrade women. The giveaway

Is not so much the fellatio, anal intercourse and lesbianism which are as monotonously s„tereotYped in sex films as the kick-in-the

groin in super-violent pictures, but the fact that the same treatment is seldom given to men as well.

Thus, in Borowczyk's Immoral Tales (X certificate), the same camera which obsessively explores the feminine anatomy, especia.11Y the pubic areas, goes all coy and Victorian at showing the male nude. I know that Sebastiane is full of naked Roman 'soldiers loving up each other, but that's a gay film where men play both male. and emale roles. Rarely does a sex movie aimed .bat a hetero audience ever study the male or orgasm,for example, as minutely as Ile woman's. (Presumably, the largely male audience is supposed to supply their own °rgasms.) The essence of porn films, it 'streems to me, is to detach the female images °m any human connection, to abstract and meaden them for our greater delectation. , Maybe it's because I'm such a creature ot il3te sexually repressed 1940s, and all those i!rtY Grable-Rita Hayworth films where a 'iss meant something else, that I find resenting porn so unexciting. Including i'floral Tales, they're all male masturbat°rY fantasies absolutely stuck, like a broken nie,edle, on one or two particular hangups. t s almost as if they were afraid to venture 'Ilk) really erotic fantasy, to fully imagine so. triething as anarchic and sometimes controllable as reciprocal human sex. I9ere is more true erotica in the single shot of Baron looking at the fully-draped but neonscious heroine in Rohmer's Die. rquise von 0, or in the dining table cvt-chat of a Chabrol thriller, than in all those magnified close-ups, for example, of 2'e. God-struck . girl in 'Therese the ktilniosopher', one of Borowczyk's four ales, moaning and gasping as she has it off

with a cucumber.

With a what? Precisely. And that, really, is what high-born porn often comes down to. The human content of Borowczyk's 'contes' is appalling, despite the director's loud claims that he is attacking censorship and defending freedom of expression by showing us a Hungarian countess lasciviously bathing in a tubful of virgins' blood. This isn't sensuality, still less a Hammer horror joke (Borowczyk has no fun with his subjects, he's too involved shooting them 'beautifully), it's a concentration camp nightmare with a sexual ven

eer. Borowczyk, who made Goto, about the

camps, must have understood the Dachau connection when he organised the sequence of the kidnapped village girls herded together into showers in his third tale, 'Erzsebet Bathory'. But he — like his fellow Pole Polanski — chooses coldly, perversely to identify with, even gloat over, the inherent violence.

Some skinflicks, like the Emmanuelles, are funny because they're unconscious parodies of Love Story-type romantic slush. Immoral Tales, though, is heavy, soporific and curiously prudish in its exploration of a

private fantasy — usually of purity defiled (all those adolescent girls dressed in transparent white). In 'The Tide', from a short story by de Mandiargues, the camera delicately turns aside from the boy's private parts while positively caressing the girl's. Technically the British censor may be to blame; in spirit it is Borowczyk.

'The Tide', in particular, upset me. It's about a Paris student, Andre, who seduces his trusting, docile sixteen-year-old cousin Julie on a beach. By using the full weight of his hectoring twenty-year-old's authority on her, he 'initiates' Julie by forcing her to perform fellatio while lecturing her on the motion of the tides creeping up on them. (There were so many 'romantic' cutaways from Andre's orgasm — characteristically, done in extreme long-shot — to seagulls and crashing waves that I thought at first this was a nature film.) According to Borowczyk, 'the girl awakes to sensuality and would not wish to stop there'. Apparently it doesn't occur to him that, as a first sexual experience for a teenage virgin, it might equally be horrific and scarring. Normally I don't get uptight over sex movies. What bothers me most of all is the acceptance of Borowczyk's cold tendentiousness as something which it is not: erotic. Porn is porn is porn.

Perhaps out of sheer relief that The Seven Per Cent Solution wasn't as bad as cracked

up to be, I liked it. Nicholas Meyer's screenplay, like his novel, fails to do justice to the original idea, but it's respectably amusing. Nicol , Williamson has the right whiplash whine as a neurotic, cocaine addicted Sherlock Holmes who is tricked by Dr Watson into consulting Alan Arkin's Dr Freud in Vienna. Holmes and Freud, the greatest detectives of their era, cooperate to rescue one of Freud's patients (Vanessa Redgrave) from the clutches of an evil

nobleman. Along the way, Holmes is successfully analysed out of his Moriartyfixation by Freud who uncovers the incest fantasy behind it all. Good clean fun amidst Ken Adam's very pretty sets. Not funny or sharp enough but, after Immoral Tales, it seems brilliant.