Cinema
Not holding his own
Christopher Hudson
The surprisingsurprising thing is that people said Portnoy's Complaint couldn't be filmed. The novel by Philip Roth, if you remember, was about an over-sexed Jewish boy whose domineering mother left him with nothing to do in life except masturbate. Holding his own against his family became a full-time occupation, and the sexual introversion this encouraged led Portnoy to the inevitable sessions with a psychoanalyst. After many disappointments he found a girl who could fulfil his erotic fantasies. For a while she brought him happiness. But his obsession with sexual satisfaction prevented any deeper relationship and they parted company. After a stopover in Israel where he found himself to he impotent (a joke which only a Jew from the diaspora can fully appreciate), Portnoy flew back to the psychiatrist's couch of Otto Spielvogel M.D. from which his Complaint was uttered.
The film, now at the Warner Rendezvous with an " X " certificate, is not the throbbing litany of self-abuse and abuse which you may have expected. Instead of focusing on the onanistic element in Portnoy and thereby casting his seed by the wayside, director Ernest Lehman wisely concentrates on the love affair between Portnoy and the girl (called the Monkey because of a position she invented for one of her former lovers). But first there are the guilt complexes, inculcated from an early age, to be illustrated in coprophiliac detail. Mama Portnoy, played by Lee Grant with a convincing blend of mollycoddling possessiveness and histrionic self-pity, works herself up into a frenzy of anxiety over her son's bowel movements while he sits on the lavatory happily masturbating over a pair of his sister's knickers. Several more ball-games of this sort follow. One quite funny one has Bubbles Girardi, a smalltime whore, remorselessly counting to fifty while Portnoy sweats out his fears of blindness and syphilis, and fails to rise to the occasion until it is too late.
Then the Monkey comes on the scene and the film takes flight. From her first appearance, bare-midriffed in a garish outfit
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