Porn Again
Using sex as a strategy for merchandising art -- and vice versa -- is as old as, well, inflatable plastic couches or see-through dresses. In the 1950s and '60s, the term "art film" was often a code phrase for porn, with or without "artistic" pretensions. And who can forget the postwar paperbacks that repackaged European classics by Zola and Stendhal as sleazy bodice-rippers with cascading-breast covers? Radley Metzger's soft-core sex films, the subject of a nine-movie retrospective at the Castro, work some of the same territory, but actually succeed as the elusive "artistic porn" only dreamed of by most auteurs of the demimonde. Metzger's care with the actors, his Brechtian shifts of time and space, gorgeous photography, stylized sets and costumes, and -- above all for modern audiences -- sophisticated attitude toward sex, drugs, and other such indulgences show a major talent who would have been recognized as such if he were working in any other realm of cinema.
In one of his masterpieces, Camille 2000 (1969), the director radically reimagines the Dumas novel by putting the tragic, consumptive heroine in an Italian villa whose furnishings provide a comprehensive catalog of European high design of the '60s. Her romantic ennui is made palatable to both herself and us as viewers by a parade of pre-postmodern couture: a transparent shift, a bizarre concoction with a layered neck that covers half her face, a chain-mail shawl and matching metal dress. Even her death has a designer feel, as she drifts into oblivion inside an oxygen tent that looks like it was made from leftovers from her bedroom curtains.
Less stylized but in a sense even more classical-ly artful is the black-and-white lesbian drama Therese and Isabelle (1968), based on a memoir by Violette LeDuc. Here Metzger abandons his obsession with decor to focus on the emotional turmoil of two coming-of-age (and coming-out) French girls at finishing school. The glories of the lesbian body is one of the alluring subtexts here, particularly in a scene where the two make love stretched out naked across the "Ultrascope" frame. The sex is at once realistic and discreet: In one sequence the two make love hidden behind a bench in a church, while the camera lovingly tracks through the vast space around them and a poetic overdub explores their reactions. Here and elsewhere, Metzger emphasizes the power and importance of his characters' affair, without the annoying moralizing, subtle or otherwise, that usually accompanies such stories. The film gains tremendously from the presence of the adult Therese as a sort of shadow figure who watches and comments on her own history as it unfolds.
On a raunchier note is Score (1972). Set in a sunny European resort, this hard-core film presents Metzger's ultimate vision of a liberated future of polymorphous pleasure. Mismarketed as a porned-up Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Score is in fact closer to the candy-colored divertissements of Russ Meyer, with two "sophisticated" bisexual swingers luring a naive couple into the joys of unfettered sex-and-drugs excess. The acting is arch and the action sometimes campy, but the politics are refreshingly modern. What made the film a failure on initial release -- its upbeat images of gay and lesbian sex no different or less important than the hetero variety -- is now one of its major virtues. The fact that history eclipsed some of the possibilities the film presents, possibilities that drive most of Metzger's work, hasn't altered their attraction.
-- Gary Morris
For a complete schedule, see the Castro entry in Reps Etc., Page 69.
