My usually reliable TV guide gave this only one and a half (out of five) stars and, judging from the lurid title, I expected either (1) a dated rehash of "The Vagina Monologues" or (2) the sort of trashy and episodic soft-core porn that is commonly seen under titles like "Sex Games in Cancun" and "Women Who Love Horses." Actually it was better than that -- funnier, nicely acted and directed and edited, and thoughtfully written.
Its chief disadvantage is that it's going to come across as a stage play, which, I was amazed to find, is not how it started out. (That it began as a French novel was a lot less surprising.) It's stagy. And, as in most plays, there's not a heck of a lot of action and little change of location. It mostly depends on talk and teamwork for its success, and thus it's likely to seem boring to anyone with barbed-wire tattoos anticipating a series of violent rapes.
Basically, it's a story of a "research group" of half a dozen or so university students in the 1920s who have been funded by Nick Nolte to have serious, frank discussions of human sexual behavior, with an eye on psychoanalytic interpretations. The original participants include a super-polite black kid in evening dress; a Brit with squinty eyes and a monumental jaw; a nerd who finger paints and whose hair reaches straight towards heaven from his scalp; a young, stern German; and Dermot Mulroney, never a fave of mine, as the deadly, intense leader. They agree that only sex will be discussed -- no love or philosophy or joking around -- and they hire two stenographers, blond Zoe, who later reveals animal impulses, and dark Alice, who wears wire-rimmed glasses and begins and ends as innocent as her namesake.
The first one or two discussions are about what you'd expect from a class of intent young students. All the words are as Latin as Havelock Ellis's, except, I suppose, "the little man in the boat" is mostly Germanic. At first the two stenographers are ignored. They're initially flustered and embarrassed. Zoe occasionally throws a smutty glance or smirk in Alice's general direction.
Then I'm forced to admit the play or the movie or whatever it is begins to lose its focus, its organization. Nolte shows up, a huffing, growling ancient wreck with wild straw hair, dragging along his wife, Tuesday Weld, whose accent touches bases with both Omsk and Canarsie. Other characters show up half-way through. We watch an avant guard film by one of them -- "Sentenced to Life," with blurry images of jail cells, shackles, and a winged seraph doing a fan dance before absorbing a man the way an amoeba engulfs a food particle. Nolte gets drunk and begins crawling all over the chuckling body of Weld like a giant, hairy tarantula. One couple don pigeon masks and bill and coo behind the drapes. Things fall apart. The center does not hold. The dramatic climax comes when Mulroney and Neve Campbell, who is Alice, feel a glandular attraction to each other but he sends her on her way, preferring the ideal figure of his masturbatory fantasies.
Alan Rudolph has done a good job of directing this jumble of incidents. There may not be much action in the plot, though there is some -- a copulation and a fist fight -- but there's plenty of liveliness in the cutting and reaction shots, enough to maintain our interest. There are some very interesting lines in the screenplay too. Weld carelessly throws out, "Sex is always the same. Love is my delusion that one man is different from another." And there is a reference to "Billy the Kid gloves," which someone must have had fun writing.
The production designer and set dresser must have had a jolly time too. You have never seen such surrealism. The decor is a radical collection of mutually repulsive junk, more radical than that of Dicken's "The Old Curiosity Shop." The plastic elephant trunk rising chin-high in desolation out of the floor kind of leaps out at you in phallic fashion. An ordinary arm chair is wrapped and tied with stuffed burlap so that it resembles a human figure with a head. Well, I'm not sure that's "surrealism." Maybe it's "dadaism." I don't know the difference. (I think Man Ray was a leader of one movement, while Ray Man led the other.)
Sometimes the film prances along and sometimes it mopes. And it's mostly those with a taste for the slightly bizarre that will get the most out of it. But it's worth more than one and a half stars.
