Bijou (1972) User Reviews (3)

Bijou, an exercise in big screen theatrical affect

[jaibo · 6/10 · 27 January 2011]

Wakefield Poole's follow-up to his ground-breaking and enormously successful 1971 gay porn feature Boys in the Sand is a surreal, artsy piece of erotica. It's setting is for the most part in dark, theatrically-lit interiors, making it seem like night to the earlier film's day, moon to Sand's sun. It continues the previous work's aesthetic of cutting the images to classical and contemporary music. Generally it feels like an experimental, underground or even drugs film.

It begins by cutting scenes of a construction site, a car driver and a goofy woman walking along the street with the Mars section of Holst's Planets suite. These disparate images come together when the driver accidentally runs the woman over and her purse is stolen by a construction worker on his way home from the site. Back in his lonely room, the worker sorts through the purse, puts on some Led Zeppelin and proceeds to jerk off to Dazed and Confused and Babe I'm Gonna Leave You. But his masturbation is interrupted when one of the female images which flashes before his mind's eye is the woman being car-struck. The worker grabs a mysterious theatre ticket he has found in her purse and heads out.

His destination is the Bijou, a seedy dive in an apartment block. A crone on the door accepts the ticket and the man enters into another world. Poole throws all of considerable resources of money and imagination into creating a strangely lit netherworld of neon instructions, reflecting mirrors, drapes and men. The protagonist takes part in a dream-like, Dionysian orgy in which he loses his individuality and merges as another figure in a pile of bodies, although his not inconsiderable endowment ensures that he is mostly the active partner in the sex. After this long sequence (which makes up over half of the film) the man leaves and the film ends.

What the accident with the woman and the antics in the Bijou have to do with each other is anyone's guess; the latter could either be an expiation of his guilt or the former might have been a ritualistic induction into another, all-male world (although she does appear, laughing, in one of the split-screens Poole uses in creating the orgy). The special effects – mostly involving zooming in and out onto theatre lights and arranging mirrors to throw multiple reflections – are pretty tacky. Yet I should think that the film did have a disorientating and dazzling effect projected large on the screen of a porn theatre in the mid-70s, where sex was doubtlessly happening off as well as off the screen and the air was heavy with smoke and amyl nitrate. As a movie creating affect in its intended viewing environment, it will have been overwhelming. Now, in the cold light of day and seen on a home screen, it's lack of narrative is a little frustrating and its mise-en-scène feels pretentious; it lacks the intellectual content of Pink Narcissus or a Kenneth Anger short. This is essentially an erotic film made for the cinema screen, and for a certain type of cinema at that.

Through the mirror

[dmgrundy · 6/10 · 7 September 2020]

Wakefield Poole's breakthrough gay porn masterpiece no doubt made it into the mainstream (and across lines of sexuality) because it 'high art' ring made it amenable to straight sexual tourists seeking out the other side, but wishing the work to be clothed in a veil of 'legitimacy'--but of course, its wall-to-wall classical music and its self-consciously 'artiness' are its strength. Who'd have thought a Hovhaness symphony would form such a deliriously appropriate soundtrack for a gay orgy? Ecstatically rising each time, stopping, starting again, as if the record were being flipped over, to the orangey-yellow glow of skin against a bare backdrop, bodies reclining, fondling, inclining, as if floating in space, the occasional Dan Flavin sculpture or lens-flare light-show the film's bijouterie along with bodies unadorned in unselfconscious communion and display. To call the film an 'erotic art film' instead of 'gay porn' is to draw a distinction between the commercial, vulgar and exploitative and the transmutatory erotic incantation that Poole refuses; at the same time, the film has a kind of educative function, in the way that its protagonist moves from solitary heterosexual fantasy to the mutual communion of queer fluidity, learning to give as well as take, to experience pleasure as a kind of ecstatic, plateaud network rather than a surge of possession and release.

The film's opening act might suggest otherwise; it is, in a sense, a self-conscious reflection on the absurdity of the narrative incident required to 'justify' the structure of the porn film as more than simply a succession of sex scenes, sex acts. Set to the blasting strains of Holst's 'Mars, the Bring of War', this opening winks at the classic porn framing of builder-as-sex-object. As our protagonist walks home from the building site where he works, the combination of pummelling machines and Holstian martial strains providing at atmosphere that suggests, perhaps, the costs of gentrification, the changing face of the city in which sex as labour or performance is placed. En route, the film stages a troubling sacrifice of a woman, struck by a car at an intersection: our protagonist picks up her purse and walks off without emotion, the ticket he finds in her purse giving him access to the mysterious sex-club which provides the film's title. This framing might suggests a renunciation, not only of heterosexuality--our nominally straight hero will be straight no longer by the time he's left the club--but of women per se. Back at the apartment, after our protagonist has fetishistically and blankly gone through the contents of the bag--orally fixating on the lipstick, picking through the belongings with a kind of curious disinterest--his masturbatory shower fantasy of pin-up girls is soundtracked, with deliberate griminess, to the strained strains of Led Zeppelin, blasted through a fuzzy pocket radio which renders the rockist odes to heterosexuality distorted and disgusted; as images of the woman's falling body jump-cut into his reverie, our hero fails to reach climax. Heterosexual possessiveness--the theft of the pleasure seen to be held as a kind of secret to be extracted from the female body (the ticket from the purse)--may lead him onto the club Bijou, where he hopes to have his sexual troubles laid to rest, but it turns out that the club will cause him to abandon such gendered power dynamics, whether those of heterosexual possession or gay misogyny. His first sexual encounter is with a figure of indeterminate gender, lying face-down on the ground--an initiation into his move away from the paradigm of male-and-female body. The next stage is to watch a kind of experimental film-within-a-film, in which the woman who'd earlier died appears, magically revived, at the centre of split-screen screen tests, bodies, costumes, posing and undressing, blurring into a kind of genderfluid mass.

The film-within-a film sets the mood for what follows--a lengthy orgy, 'presided over' by a centurion-type who stalks around with a whip (though the S&M factor is more an allusion than an actual presence). Poole's lack of interest in the money shot, in a kind of sex-as-labour performance, gives the sequence a peculiar and endless rhythm, amplified by his decision to remove diegetic sound and instead overlay things with the non-diegetic, harking back to the days of silent film and the peculiar visual rhythms and intensities thus implied. Performing as much for themselves as for each other, voyeurism becomes part of erotic exchange rather than a logic of extraction: a space of fluid fantasy, bijouterie, un-self-conscious, with nothing to justify or explain away--the other side of the magic mirror, the rabbit-hole, the door to all wonders.

Yawn

[babedarla-123-101218 · 3/10 · 26 June 2018]

Bijou starts with spooky, militaristic music full of crescendos and minor chords. We see a construction pit that looks like it could be a war scene: A construction workers wears a hardhat that looks like a WWI Infantry helmet, he operates a machine that looks like a WWII tank. It's all very band of brothers. I suppose that it's meant to show us the camaraderie of men...I suppose. Wakefield Poole wanted to make an abstract movie that made everyone come away with a different view of what they had just watched, where every viewer found their own meaning. Art films from the Seventies, oh joy. The film crosscuts scenes from three different settings: a construction worker going home from work, a woman who's smiling, broadly as she jay-walks her way around Manhattan, and a scowling guy driving a Mercedes. There images of wheels, I don't know why, I don't think the director knows either. The woman jaywalks one last time, gets hit by the Mercedes, and the construction worker, steals her purse. Yeah, that all makes sense...except of course, it doesn't! Wakefield Poole waxes on in the commentary about the "tension" created by the protagonist stealing the purse. He claims that it keeps the viewer's attention. He could have a point: "The imageries of pornography actively play with, and try to evoke, such ambivalent entanglements in order to grab audience attention. An image may evoke disgust in one person, amusement in another, or sexual arousal and fury in yet others." (Paasonen) He certainly got my attention. And my disgust. Not disgust at this being a porn film, or a gay porn film. (though I must admit to a certain amount of disgust upon realizing it was an art film from the seventies) What engendered my disgust was the act of stealing the injured woman's purse. He lost my sympathy and he became an unlikeable protagonist. I'm not certain this was Mr. Poole intent, but he does go on to speak about people wanting to know what it meant that the character stole the purse: "It doesn't necessarily mean anything, but the fact that you don't know what it means is what's intriguing about it. And so, you have to make up your own version about what's going on here." Okay, fine, it doesn't really mean anything, but... The protagonist goes back to his dingy walk-up, dumps the purse and looks through the contents. According to the commentary, the things in the purse supposedly represent the things that cause us problems in life. The rosary for religion, a picture of a lover, keys that represent responsibility...oh, yeah, and a ticket for Bijou "tonight only" (which is likely the only real reason the car/girl/accident/purse thing even happened) It's interesting that a filmmaker that wants to create a film without any specific meaning would weave it with so much symbolic imagery-and even discuss the meaning of that imagery in his commentary. (I wonder what the wheels in the end of the construction site scene and the beginning of the driving scene really meant. Oh! Yeah! I'm supposed to assign my own meaning) The main character is fixated by a lipstick, repeatedly tonguing it-why? Lipstick tastes bad. I guess it's supposed to be sexy. It's not. He masturbates, and we see his huge cock in one hand, his other hand holding the tiny lipstick. Contrast, perhaps? He stops, goes to the shower, masturbates some more, but never really seems involved in his own body. At one point he's almost in his own flesh, but he flashes back to the woman being killed and loses his...focus. Long story short he looks at the ticket again-the commentary hinting that the flashback reminded him-and dresses to go out. The filmmaker utilizes cliched voyeuristic shots from a darkened room into the brightly lit room the character is in, using the doorway as a frame. The last shot of his room is the face of a hellish looking man, demon, Rockstar, Rasputin, who can tell? The ominous look makes me think it's foreshadowing, but the commentary tells us that this is El Greco's "Christ" which is supposed to be a "clue" to the character's character-though a better clue is provided in next scene, when Bijou is called the protagonist's "place of worship on Prince Street". We are also told that his "curiosity and courage" are what makes him go there) The commentary tells us how important music is to this film, so I can't forget to mention the music in the apartment. Zeppelin: "Been dazed and confused for so long it's not true Wanted a woman, never bargained for you Lots of people talk and few of them know Soul of a woman was created below, yeah" Dazed and confused, got it. Wanted a woman, but, soul of a woman, etc. Understood. Women bad. Gay porn, okey-dokey. ('scuse the snark, but the only truly obvious bit of metaphor in the whole damned film, and this is it?) Now, to the Place of Worship on Prince St. which our protagonist finds easily, despite a lack of apparent address or indication that he's in the right place. There's a long shot of him coming up a narrow staircase into a darkened vestibule with a garishly lit ticket window, manned by an equally garish older woman: clownlike, loud blue eyeshadow, false lashes with gobs of glue stringing down from the corner of her eye. It's all carnival, with circus music and lit in high contrast, with quick focus pulls to extreme close-ups of the clown-like woman. A sign on the wall says Bijou in flashing lighting. Clown-woman utters the first dialogue of the film "Right through there." Off our "hero" goes following directions lit on the walls like this happens every day. (this must be the "courage and curiosity" the filmmaker spoke of) He takes off his shoes, then clothes, stands in a section of funhouse mirrors fondling and caressing himself, then he's in a circle of himself, holding his own hands. Narcissistic much? His image morphs into that of another man but changes back to his own when he reaches out...he's walks through a hallway of gold mylar curtains so sparkly, so shiny, so mysterious! (have I said how much I hate 70's art films?) We pass bizarre sculptural elements, that I think are supposed to represent body parts. (One of them is a tongue coming out of a mouth, but the tongue is really a penis) The commentary tells us what these images are all about: "This was the seventies, the height of the drug period." (finally, something that makes sense)"These are the sorts of things we liked to look at, when we were high on marijuana or mescaline or whatever we were on...I wanted to create an 'Oh WOW!' effect." Okay, now this is something I get, even though it features the overindulgences of the seventies art world, I now understand where it's coming from! But, far be it from me to let a bit of understanding prevent me from going full snark on the next bit of the film: A man lies spread eagle with a strobe light flashing on his naked body. So, our hero fucks him. I mean, why not? The guy was just lying there. The sex scene is shot in such a way that it's hard to tell where one body begins, and the other ends. Even the penetration view looks like one double headed cock and two assholes. Again, how very narcissistic. (And how very seventies! Did Peter max art direct this scene?) Finally, the two bodies separate and reach tenderly for each other. I mean, of course you've got to have tender feelings for some random stranger you've just randomly fucked! Next is a bunch of arty-arty nonsense with a split screen and some masturbatory money shots, which turn out to be the other actors screen tests, (hey film was expensive, why waste those money shots!) followed by a series of "nibble-nibble-suck"s, then all five men posing like Greco-Roman men on the vases and plates unearthed in places like Pompeii. (you know, all those sex-scenes that the Victorians hid away in their secret museums) The men seem nearly as static as a painting on a plate. They seem uninvolved, taking no pleasure in what they're doing-they're mostly flaccid, so what does that say about their level of involvement? They all look dreamy, uncertain or bored. Or maybe high, which is verified in the commentary. (of course it is!) The commentary also verifies my comparison of the men onscreen to Grecian art: the orgy scene was modeled after Greek and Roman art from antiquity, though he rationalizes the boring pace of it by saying that he wanted the mood to be "almost religious, very spiritual." He also implied some misdirection that would explain the men's tentative actions and slow movements: he wanted the guys to behave as though it could've been their first time with a man. After all, the ticket was in a woman's purse, these guys were probably expecting a woman-or so he wanted the audience to suspect. (and again, for a film where the audience is supposed to make up their own take of what is happening, he certainly reveals a ton of subtext in his commentary!) He wanted everyone's sexuality to be ambiguous, he wanted the orgy to be "languid and slow" (and, boy howdy did he succeed on that one) The scene ends with a series of ever-so-arty focus pulls of the klieg lights with different colored gels. (If I had to assign meaning to these focus pulls I would suspect that they represent the in and out of fucking. But, that's just my interpretation) And...there is an awful lot of walking around in this movie! (which is also verified in the commentary) Everyone leaves, except for the protagonist, who looks rather sad. (Finally! There's SOME emotion in this movie!) He sleeps. He wakes up. (here the commentary reveals some other potential misdirection by the filmmaker: "Did it really happen? Was it all a dream?") He reverses course, putting ON his clothes, then his shoes, then his jacket, passes through the hall of mirrors, passes the clown-woman, (who utters the only OTHER dialogue in this movie) walks outside lights up a smoke, faces the camera and SMILES the biggest, brightest smile you've ever seen... Art films of the seventies. We're not supposed to understand them. And I don't.