Cinema
The Sex Mission (`15', Gate Notting Hill)
Future imperfect
Peter Ackroyd
This film enters that area most agree- able to the fantasist, the 'future' — the word has to be put within quotation marks, since the cinematic version of that state bears as little relation to chronology as a chocolate-box cover does to the waterfall which it is supposed to represent . . . but now we are in 1991, when two young Poles (for this is a Polish film, directed by Juliusi Machulski) are deposited in what the sub-titles deign to call 'sarcophaguses' 10 order to hibernate over a period of years. It is hailed as a victory of 'man over nature', but the description is wrong on both counts: the machinery malfunctions in a less than victorious way and the two men wake up in 2044 to find the planet exclu- sively populated by females. Apart from this incidental particular, it is the usual future: there has (as always) been a disastrous war, the women look like airline stewardesses except that they bran- dish clipboards, the furniture is designed by Conran or some Polish equivalent, and the walls are padded with styrofoam. The, plot, such as it is, concerns the attempts of the two men to avoid 'naturalisation', nr, being changed into women: 'For them,' one very elderly resident of the future remarks, 'that's a fate worse than death., The old party then goes into ecstasies at the mere sight of a male organ.
For those who thought the Poles were capable only of rather solemn and some- times bitter films, even this attempt at humour may come as something of a revelation. But it cannot be said that the comedy is much of a success: it is generallY crude, and relies to so large an extent 11P0° stereotypes and upon the rather more obvious aspects of the futuristic situation that it might best be seen as a cinematic equivalent of the Eurovision Song Contest. In other respects, however, The Sex Ma' sion resembles nothing so much as a television comedy since the two men, who are portrayed as dumb but lovable, per- petually exchanging puzzled glances and getting into 'scrapes', are familiar items from the depository of stock types.
But this sympathetic identification with the male pair does mean that the film adopts a less than feminist position. De- spite the interesting proposition that men are the links between apes and us', this is really a male fantasy of sexuality in which the women are either cold automatons or hysterical harpies. In fact a world domin- ated by women is portrayed as a soul-less Waste land (the nearest equivalent would, I suppose, be a future run exclusively by female newscasters), but this may be not so much a commentary upon the director's predilections as a faithful reflection of the usual clichés about the future: it is general- ly assumed by film-makers that the world Will then resemble some hybrid of Habitat and the GPO Tower.
As the film progresses, however, it becomes more overtly a satire on feminism Itself as the idea of 'the male as enemy' is seen to result in a kind of hysterical authoritarianism (this did not seem to please the more enlightened members of the audience in the Gate, Notting Hill). At one point the men are asked to sign a declaration that they 'were born male against their suggesting that some analogy is being drawn with the communist system of show trials and false confession — a likeness compounded by the fact that history in this new world has been rewrit- ten and that both Copernicus and Einstein are revealed to be female.
But even this political barb by the Polish elm-maker only proves the crudeness of the film's conception (I say nothing of its execution, which intimates in the nicest Possible way that it was made on a very low budget). It ik not that it lacks good humour the problem really is that it has too Much of that popular commodity, and the over-exuberance of the farce misses some of the more significant possibilities which the narrative offered. Even though some of the women had a distinctly mannish a. PPearance, for example, there was no Interesting realignment of sexual roles: there was a discourse on parthenogenesis but, for those who entered the cinema on the mistaken assumption that the title promised pornography, parthenogenesis May not have been enough. But some of the film's disadvantages Were not of its own making: I suspect that Much of its humour is lost on an English audience, at least in the sense that Poland 1s a much more 'sexist' society where the idea of authoritarian women is more thril- lingly unusual. Certainly the sexuality of everyone concerned is played within very narrow limits: when the two refugees from the Eternal Feminine have small identifica- tion tags placed on their ears, one of them Pleads, 'Don't turn us into gays!' The Polish word was no doubt somewhat diffe- rent, but in any case the joke will fall flat °n a society such as ours where most heterosexual males wear earrings as a Matter of common decency. In other words, The Sex Mission is a very old- fashioned satire, the product of a repres- sive society trying desperately to have some fun. As a result it is rather heavy- going and, in the end, silly: only to be recommended to those who have an insati- able and, on this occasion, invincible in- terest in the Polish cinema.
Previous page
