From [email protected] Tue Nov 14 17:17:07 CST 1995
Article: 83850 of alt.sex.movies
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From: [email protected] (Blowfish)
Newsgroups: alt.sex.movies
Subject: REVIEW: Delta of Venus
Date: 14 Nov 1995 10:37:36 -0800
Organization: Blowfish: Good Products for Great Sex
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Life is Too Short for Soft-Core Porn
Copyright 1995 Greta Christina
(Written for The Spectator; reprinted by permission of The
Spectator and the author.)
Delta of Venus. New Line. Directed by Zalman King. Starring
Audie England and Costas Mandylor. Written by Elisa Rothstein.
Produced by Evzen Kolar. Rated NC-17.
When I told a friend of mine about Delta of Venus, his
response was to describe a cartoon he once saw in the New Yorker.
The caption read, "Life is too short for soft-core porn."
That's Delta of Venus in a nutshell. The actual review of
this movie is going to be very short. In a word: Stinkeroo.
We're talking seriously boring, folks; ill-conceived, poorly-
executed, unrelievedly dull, and a complete and utter failure in
the clit-hardening department.
Directed by Zalman King (the same genius who wrote 9 1/2
Weeks and wrote and directed Wild Orchid), Delta of Venus is a
quasi-mainstream art-sex movie loosely based on the wonderful
collection of short stories by Anais Nin. There's a vague plot
about the erotic and artistic awakenings of the main character
Elena (Audie England), who is loosely based on Anais Nin, and her
torrid and painful relationship with Lawrence (Costas Mandylor),
who seems to be loosely based on Henry Miller. But the plot is
pretty much a joke, a frayed and tenuous thread whose sole
function in life is to string together the various erotic stories
and fantasies that Elena experiences and/or imagines.
Hmmm. A bunch of sex scenes held together by a tissue-thin
plot. Sound familiar? Sound like almost every porn movie you've
seen? Well, you got it 100% right, my friend; pick up your prize
at the door. So why does Delta of Venus fall under my
jurisdiction as the Spectator's mainstream film critic? In one
word: NC-17.
One might ask what difference there really is between NC-17
and X. There does seem to be a distinction of some sort,
although, like many of our culture's distinctions having to do
with sex, it gets rather hazy and inconsistent when you examine
it closely. There's the obvious legal difference, of course; NC-
17 is copyrighted by the Motion Picture Association of America,
whereas the X rating is not. In practical terms, this means an
NC-17 movie is one that the studio bothered to submit to the MPAA
and get rated. An X rating, on the other hand, is given to a
film by its manufacturers, who aren't big Hollywood studios and
couldn't give less of a fuck about the MPAA. (It also means, in
theory, that movie theaters and newspapers that won't exhibit or
advertise porn flicks should be able to handle the NC-17 stuff.
However, in practice, the theaters and newspapers have been
pissants, and an NC-17 rating makes it almost as hard to get
access to the mainstream movie infrastructure as the dreaded X
does.)
There is, of course, another difference, one that has to do
with the somewhat murkier world of marketing and promotion. To a
potential audience, NC-17 signals some degree of serious artistic
quality. This seems to translate as no insertion shots,
reasonably high Hollywood-style production values, and a somewhat
better pretense at "redeeming social importance" than most porn
flicks have. (That may be a bit unfair of me; "Henry and June,"
the first film to get the NC-17 rating, has more than just a
pretense at redeeming social importance; and, in fact I would
argue that many porn flicks do as well. That aside, I think the
point still stands.) X, on the other hand, signifies...well, X
signifies smut. And more power to it.
But if Delta of Venus and Showgirls are any indication,
there's another, more significant difference between NC-17 and X.
The difference: X is better. X is hotter, X is more
interesting, and much of the time, X is smarter and better made.
I do realize that there's a big problem inherent in making
an NC-17 movie, and that's getting acting talent. After all,
Michelle Pfeiffer and Meryl Streep probably aren't going to do
arty soft-core porn flicks, even if you ask them nicely and offer
them lots of money. (Neither are Antonio Banderas or Ralph
Fiennes, more's the pity.) And if you're trying to make a nice
respectable NC-17 art-sex movie instead of a nasty old X-rated
porn flick, you're probably not going to hire Nina Hartley or
Jeff Stryker. Which puts you in a bit of a bind; you have to
find non-porn actors and actresses who will nevertheless do
almost-explicit sex on screen.
Unfortunately, non-porn people who'll do sex stuff doesn't
seem to be the deepest talent pool in the business. If the
quality of acting in Delta of Venus (or Showgirls, another recent
NC-17 loser) is any indication, it's a very shallow pool indeed.
Audie England's performance as Elena is just terrible, the worst
of both worlds; she can't do a hot sex scene, and she can't act.
Her idea of deep emotional expression is to pout. She pouts when
she's angry, she pouts when she's horny, she pouts when she's
lonely, and when she's having an orgasm she closes her eyes and--
you guessed it--pouts. Costas Mandylor as Lawrence isn't much
better; his performance consists primarily of a whole lot of
smoldering stares. Very blank smoldering stares. He seems to
think that smoldering consists of lowering the chin, staring very
hard at the camera, and emptying one's mind of all conscious
thought.
And the overall quality of the movie is peculiarly
dispassionate. It's infested with scenes of people dancing
wildly through the streets of Paris, supposedly signifying a mad
impetuosity and a surrender to sensual possibilities. But the
execution is so fake, so forced, that it winds up having the
exact opposite effect. It doesn't have the feel of people giving
themselves over to the moment; it feels like people making a
stilted and self-conscious attempt to give themselves over to the
moment. Worse, the sex scenes are...well, boring. Tepid. At
best, one or two of them were sort of pretty, interesting to
watch, kind of. Not one of them made me wet, and not one of them
gave me something to think about the next time I whacked off.
Which leads me to the most important quality that I feel
makes X a better animal than NC-17: honesty. Even the most
pretentious X-rated porn flick, with the dorkiest arty special
effects and camera tricks, is still very clear about its purpose,
which is to get your dick/clit hard and get you off. That's not
to say that porn filmmakers are never trying to express
themselves artistically or politically; I think, at least
sometimes, they are. But there's a straightforward quality to X-
rated flicks, a direct and unabashed appeal to the audience's
desire to look at people having sex, that is almost completely
lacking in the world of NC-17. (An odd tangent: My computer's
thesaurus program gives the synonyms for "explicit" as "definite,
distinct, precise, specific, candid, frank, outspoken,
unreserved." Well, maybe it's not a tangent. Maybe it's exactly
the point I'm trying to get across.)
So if I like X-rated films for their honesty, the obvious
implication is that NC-17 movies are, to some extent, dishonest.
(Or, at any rate, that Delta of Venus and Showgirls are
dishonest.) I realize that these are fightin' words, and I'd
like to give an example of what I mean. That example, the one
that annoys me to the point of infuriation, is the lack of what I
call "nudity parity." By "nudity parity," I mean that male and
female bodies are exposed roughly equally, with roughly the same
degree of vulnerability. To put it more bluntly--if a movie
shows pussy, it should show cock as well. And not just one or
two brief teasing shots flitting by, either. If there are
buttloads of full-frontal female images, there should be
buttloads of men in their full-frontal glory as well.
Now, nudity parity is tricky to do if you want your film to
get an R rating. For some inexplicable reason (I'm sure it
couldn't possibly be sexism), a naked dick is much harder to get
past the MPAA than a naked pussy is. So when I review R-type
movies, I do cut them a bit of slack on this issue.
But Delta of Venus isn't rated R. It never stood a chance
of being rated R, and I doubt that anybody expected it to. Its
subject is sex, it's full of sex scenes both tender and wild, and
it parades female frontal nudity all over the damn place. But in
scenes where male frontal nudity would be appropriate, it pulls
every coy trick in the book; covering the guy with sheets, having
him stand behind sofas, shooting him from the back or from the
side or above the waist. (Showgirls, another NC-17 loser, did
the same thing. The movie's only actual fuck scene took place,
rather conveniently, in a swimming pool, and Kyle MacLachlan's
nude scenes were carefully crafted to keep the camera away from
his dick.)
Now, if nudity is so important for the movie's artistic
statement about sex, then why is all the nudity female? I can
only think of two reasons, and I don't think much of either one.
Either the director is thinking purely in terms of images that
will please a het male audience, or he identifies with the male
characters and doesn't want to make them vulnerable by exposing
their dicks to the entire adult free world. Either way, it's
sexist and dishonest.
If Zalman King and Eszterhas/Verhoeven (the writer/director
of Showgirls) are any indication, the guys who make NC-17 movies
want it both ways. They want to make sex movies, but don't want
to be treated like scum. They want to make smut, but they want
some degree of respectability as well. And for all my criticism
of the NC-17 aesthetic, for all my criticism of these filmmakers'
lack of courage and vision, I can't argue too much with this
desire. In a better world, they should be able to do that...and
other filmmakers, better filmmakers, filmmakers with a serious
erotic vision, should be able to do it as well. The distinction
between NC-17 and X is, in essence, the distinction between
erotica and pornography, between art and smut. And as such, it
is useless, pointless, arbitrary, and ultimately damaging to the
creative process.
--
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