The Powers of Ten (London Film Festival)

As is the custom, the opening of the London Film Festival must be met with a mournful note, acknowledging the fact that the vast majority of LFF films that disappear from view (at least within the UK) once the red-carpet is packed away.

But whilst most of the 200 odd features screened in any given year struggle to justify inclusion, let alone wider distribution, a number of important works have regrettably been forced into this vanishing act. This year will be my tenth LFF, and so, with metric precision, I hereby offer, in no particular order, ten films that deserve some sort of resurrection:

1. Cargo 200 (Aleksey Balabanov 2007)

Violated is probably too strong a word, but I came out of the screening of Cargo 200 feeling pretty sick and angry at the whole ordeal. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. Probably Balabanov’s finest.

2. A Portugese Nun (Eugene Green 2009)

Far and away Green’s most audience friendly work (and also my favourite). Formal intellectualism warmed in the Lisbon sun.

3. Copacabana (2007) and Elementary Training for Actors (2009)  (both Martín Rejtman)

The recent Latin America season at BFI allowed me to take in Rejtman’s more traditionally fictive (and equally brilliant) The Magic Gloves. These two short exercises in absurdist pseudo-documentary would make an excellent double feature for an ambitious distributor.

4. Captain Ahab (Philippe Ramos 2007)

Denis Lavant plays a francophone Ahab (it’s pronounced Akhab) in this episodic, revisionary study. Due to a scheduling anomaly, I actually walked out of the last 10 minutes of this, convinced that it would find a home here. I was wrong.

5. Ox hide (Liu Jiayin 2005)

Liu Jiayin’s playfully rigorous study of a bickering Beijing family (her own) would undoubtedly be a tough sell. What saddens me more is the fact that her follow up, Oxhide II, has yet to screened at all in the UK.

6 Mister V (Emilie Deleuze 2004)

Ok, so I don’t really remember much about this film, and my notes went missing long ago. I recall a horse and the fact that it was made by Gilles Deleuze’s daughter. Attempts to track down a copy have remained frustrating.

7. Dealer (Benedek Fliegauf 2004)

By most accounts Fliegauf‘s new film Womb (to be screened this year) is a bit of a stinker, and his last one, Milky Way, was something of a disappointment. But this elegantly grubby tale of a drug dealer’s final hours hit the spot for me.

8. As I was moving ahead I occasionally saw brief glimpses of beauty (Jonas Mekas 2000)

Over the years I have become slightly more suspicious of Jonas Mekas’ self proclaimed Messiah status; but the experience of this six hour dairy film collage (spread over two days) was, without doubt, the highlight of my first LFF; and one that had a profound impact on my cinematic interests for some considerable time.

9. The Possibility of an Island (Michel Houellebecq 2008)

The author’s deeply odd adaptation of his own cult, cult novel was, I remember thinking, a bit like a French and Saunders parody of a Taskovsky movie. But in a good way.

10. Virgin Stripped Bare by her Bachelors (Hong Sangsoo 2001)

The sad fact that not a single Hong Sangsoo film has gained full distribution in the UK was partially corrected by the brilliantly conceived ICO tour earlier this year. That said, the odd touring show doesn’t count, so I’ll name this – the first Hong I saw, and still one of my favourites – as my final choice.

The Comfort of Strangers (Part Two)

[This post is the second part to a discussion on one night stands in cinema, that began with a look at Love with the Proper Stranger and Knocked Up, which was itself inspired by a previous post on Mike Figgis' film One Night Stand] 


Partie de Campagne (Jean Renoir 1936)

To refer to the event that occurs towards the end of Jean Renoir's Partie de Campagne as a one night stand is problematic for two reasons: (1) we never actually see if what happens between Henri and Henriette results in sex, and (2) whatever does occur, clearly occurs during the day. But still, with your forgiveness, I shall persevere. 

The film, mostly set on an idle, picnicking summer's day, follows the Parisian Dufour family on their trip to the country. M. and Mme Dufour, their daughter Henriette, her rather pathetic fiancé Anatole, and a batty grandmother arrive at a isolated bistro. As Henriette plays on a swing, she is spied by two local boatsmen, Rudolph and Henri, who discuss their options. Rudolph senses an opportunity, but Henri is more cautious.

"You're afraid of the pox" says Rudolph 

"No, of responsibilities. What would you do with that girl on the swing?" 

"I'd invite her for a row. We'd land somewhere to stretch our legs…Then I'd have a little fun." 

"Suppose a baby.." 

"If children resulted from every bit of fun..the world would be overpopulated." (*)

But eventually Henri overcomes his unease, and the two men conspire to get Henriette and her mother away from their respective partners with the proposal of a boat trip. As Rudolph takes care of the giggling, flirtatious Mme, Henri leads the more serious minded Henriette away. Seemingly entranced in pantheist fervor, Henriette the city girl listens to the sounds of a nightingale's song; Henri, similarly possessed by his own (baser) instincts, works his arm around the young woman's waist. She resists, but is eventually led. Now sitting on the ground, Henri forcibly angles her head towards his. He kisses her but is pushed away. Undeterred, he continues, pressing her to the ground. She relents and they kiss without force. As their faces pull apart we see a tear rolling down Henriette's cheek.


A blissful submission to an impossible love, or a prelude to rape? Henriette's tearful look towards the camera continues to produce contradictory readings. 

In his book on Renoir, Andre Bazin discusses the brief scene: 

The love scene on the island is one of the most agonizing and beautiful in all of cinema. It owes its stunning effectiveness to a couple of gestures and a look from Sylvia Bataille which have a renching emotional realism. In the space of a few frames she expresses all the disenchantment, the pathetic sadness that follows the act of love. 

Disenchantment and pathetic sadness. Much as in Love with the Proper Stranger, the girl's adolescent romantic idealism is crushed by sexual realities. Unlike Angie, however, Henriette never gets to articulate her feelings. Renoir cuts from the couple to shots of an impending storm, a more lyrical punishment for transgression than Angie's pregnancy.


Does it end with the kiss? Does Henri's fear of paternal responsibility hold him back? Or his realization of Henriette's sadness? Whatever the result, it is clear that Henriette's trauma is genuine. 

Over the storm, inter-titles inform of us of passing years with "Sundays as bleak as Mondays". And then we are back, with Henriette and Anatole now presumably married, sitting under the same tree by the same river. Henri appears and Henriette approaches him, visibly moved by his presence. He tells her he often comes to this spot as it holds his happiest memory. "Every night I remember" she says ambiguously, her eyes clouded up with tears again. 

Vendredi Soir (Claire Denis 2002)

The one night stand between Laure and Jean in Claire Denis' Vendredi Soir is notable for taking place on home turf. In the majority of films discussed (all bar Solitary Man and Knocked Up) events have been staged in the 'non-spaces' of out of town trips, pointing to the liminal nature of such trysts. But Vendredi Soir is very much about homes, and about knowing where we belong. Laure, a woman we take for being somewhere in her thirties, has packed up her boxes to move in with her unseen partner. Like Alison in Knocked Up, her life is in transition (and in this case, quite literally in transit). Rather foolishly, she attempts to spend her last night of freedom with dinner at a friend's, even though a Metro strike has brought Paris to a virtual standstill. 

Denis' film is far and away the most subjective work outlined here. Laure is never off screen (excluding point of view shots, and fragments of her imagined thoughts). Even the (feminine) voice on the car radio seems to be speaking just to her. Jean, a handsome, slightly older man, appears out of nowhere and climbs into her car. He could easily be a figment of her agile imagination, like the sentient floor-lamp or the animated pizza toppings (seriously..If you haven't already done so, I recommend you watch this film right away). We and she (if the two are indeed divisible) presume he wants sex. Although they hardly exchange words, they are soon at it in a local hotel room. The next morning she leaves with a smile on her face. 

The film can be (and has been) read as a feminist reclamation of the presumed male desire for anonymous sex. There is no punishment, no sadness; the sex isn't grubby or cheap. Laure and Jean's perfect union is perfectly brief. There's no need for regret here; whatever there is between them, it isn't love. 

Laure begins the film as a commodity, boxed up and ready to be shipped to her boyfriend's apartment. In one of her few dialogue exchanges, a man leans out of his car window and asks her "How much?" The proposition turns out to be for her car, advertised as 'For Sale' in a hand written note. By the film's end she will have clawed back some of her sexual identity; perhaps for one night, or perhaps for good.



(*) It should be said that this film takes place in the late 19th Century

Muybridge, Bazin and the wobble.

At the entrance to the Eadweard Muybridge exhibition at Tate Britain, the following disclaimer is displayed in friendly Tate font:

"Please be aware that this exhibition contains images of nudity and other images that visitors may find challenging."

Well, we all like a challenge, don’t we?

The exhibition makes a persuasive case for Muybridge, not only as an instrumental figure in cinema’s pre history, but also as a profound influence on 20th century painting and as a pretty damn fine landscape photographer in his own right.

The story of Occident the horse and Muybridge’s first attempts at capturing movement on film is well known. But as his technique developed, he soon took to depicting the human form, and his series Animal Locomotion of 1887 began to feature the kind of imagery the Tate still deems challenging.

Turning around in surprise and running away. 1887

Getting into bed. 1887

Muybridge’s quasi scientific objectives (note the gridded backgrounds) may well mask some rather more perverse intentions, but it’s not easy for a 21st century eye to see the plates as eroticism. If Muybridge has any detectable fetish, it is for movement: an urge to capture the unstructured wobble of the human form in action.

In Bazin’s seminal essay The Evolution of the Language of Cinema, he neglects to mention the wobble as an antidote to the pleasures of montage, but in his defence of duration (citing Flaherty’s Nanook of the North) he describes this human need to view uncondensed action, and the process of time occuring.

What matters to Flaherty, confronted with Nanook hunting the seal, is the relation between Nanook and the animal; the actual length of the waiting period. Montage could suggest the time involved. Flaherty however confines himself to showing the actual waiting period; the length of the hunt is the very substance of the image, its true object. Thus in the film this episode requires one setup. Will anyone deny that it is thereby much more moving than a montage by attraction?

Bazin, like Muybridge, is fixated on the desire to see an action for what it is, from beginning to end; be it seal hunting or getting into bed.

Bazin lost the argument of course. Patterns show a pretty steady reduction is average shot length from the early days of film to contemporary Hollywood. And whilst there are those outside of Hollywood who try to keep the tradition of the long-take alive, for anyone working in any kind of identifiable mainstream the quick cut is king.

So was our desire for unadulterated movement a temporary, historical blip? What happened to our need for duration?

In her article Excess and ecstasy: constructing female pleasure in porn movies Eithne Johnson cites the average shot length of Aerobisex Girls (1983) as between 14 and 15 seconds (compared to a mainstream average of around 3.5 – 4 seconds). And I would imagine this example is far from extreme. In contemporary hardcore pornography, the Bazinain long-take finds its last outpost. Muybridge’s movement fetish appears alive and well in this world where witnessing the duration of the action is still paramount. I’m sure there are a lot of theories about why the consumption of pornography is on the increase, but could this stifled need for accurate temporal representation be one?



POSTSCRIPT


From Herzog on Herzog, Werner talks about his 'Minnesota Declaration' for 'ecstatic truth':


The background to the 'Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Filmmaking' is a very simple one. I had flown from Europe to San Francisco and back again in a very short space of time and had ended up in Italy, where I was directing an opera. Jet-lagged as I was, I could not sleep and turned on the television at midnight to be confronted by a very stupid, uninspiring documentary, something excruciatingly boring about animals somewhere out there in the Serengeti, all very cute and fluffy. At 2 a.m. I turned the television on again and watched something equally bad, the same kind of crap you find on television wherever you go. But then at 4 a.m. I found some hard-core porno, and I sat up and said to myself, 'My God, finally something straightforward, something real, even if it is purely physical.' For me the porno had real naked truth.

The Comfort of Strangers (Part One)

A previous post on Mike Figgis' riff on a Joe Eszterhas concept: One Night Stand, has stirred a curiosity in other cinematic imaginings of such ultra-temporal love affairs. Of course a 'one night stand' in a mainstream movie is very rarely that; the dictates of classical narrative structure rarely allow for such necessarily unresolved encounters. Two notable recent films however, have broken with type by displaying the action for what it is. In Solitary Man (pictured), Michael Douglas plays a granddad womanizer on his way out (they went with a Neil Diamond reference for the title, but Leonard Cohen's Death of a Ladies Man would have been equally fitting) who at one point makes gentle pornography with a friend of his daughter, only to discard her in the morning. Todd Solondz's Life During Wartime (what is it with stealing song titles?) re-introduces the pederast dad from Happiness, who finds a haggard looking Charlotte Rampling in a hotel bar, has sex with her, and then takes money from her wallet. In these films, much as in life, the one night stand exists as shorthand for alienated loneliness and self loathing (other examples, off the top of my head, include Nashville, The Last Days of Disco and a number of John Cassavettes works). That said, could such 'quick fix' arrangements be seen as aping the film-going experience? As very immediate, short-term patches of vicarious experience, in place of more enduring pursuits like a novel or TV series, that might require a certain level of commitment?

In the films mentioned above, the one night stands (however important) cannot really be seen as inherently necessary plot points. In Figgis' One Night Stand, as in the two films I wish to now briefly discuss, the faux 'one night stands' serve as catalysts for further (sexual and non sexual) encounters.


Love with the Proper Stranger (Robert Mulligan 1963)

Love with the Proper Stranger, staring Steve McQueen as a jobbing musician and Natalie Wood as his one-off partner, is a rather unnerving mix of high tragedy and knock about comedy. Uneven to say the least, the film is a fascinating muddle. Anti-romantic, but still pretty damn sexy; at one moment chillingly graphic, the next warmly funny, the film's refusal to type is perhaps the reason for its relative obscurity today.

In this film the sex is back-story. Turning up at a vast casting session in hope of finding work, Rocky (McQueen) is confronted by Angie (Wood). He struggles to remember her face, let alone her name, but when she informs him that she's pregnant things quickly fall into place. Rocky finds the name of a doctor and tries to cobble together some cash to help pay off the backstreet abortionist and middle-man. Meanwhile Angie's interfering family try to set her up with an undesirably cack-handed suitor (Tom Bosley, later to be Mr C in Happy Days, making his big screen debut).


Angie's romanticism is mocked by her family, who see her dreams of film stars and happily-ever-after as fodder for abuse. But her present situation has made her more pragmatic. Holed up with Rocky in his parents furniture workshop (trophies of the domestic life the pair seek to avoid hang from the ceiling, accusingly) she finally discusses the "stupid experiment" of hooking-up with McQueen: "Oh boy how they build things up in the books and all the movies.. How the world comes to an end every time the flame of your lips touches mine...All I felt was just scared and disgusted with myself." It's a pretty damning indictment, and Rocky doesn't quite know what to say. Even as the inevitable romance gets underway, Angie's words remain as a corrective. The sex was cheap, wrong and, despite of any future associations, a wholly regrettable mistake.

Knocked Up (Judd Apatow 2007)

In Knocked Up, Ben, a slovenly but almost endearing man-child with aspirations to the more acceptable end of the internet porn industry, meets and impregnates Alison, a career minded media-type. Alison is out a club with her sister to celebrate her recent promotion to an 'on camera' role at the E! Entertainment channel. Her married sister craves sexual acceptance from the body conscious youth that populate the club, but shows no real desire to takes things further than coy smiles and batted eyelids when men approach. Alison meets Ben, who does good bar banter, and he comes over to join their table. Eventually, the sister leaves, with Alison rejecting the option to join her.

One of the many problems with Knocked Up (a film I still like, for what it's worth) is its failure to address just why Alison sleeps with Ben. She doesn't appear to share the misplaced romanticism of LWTPS's Angie (no "flame of your lips" here). Yes, she gets drunk, but she appears relatively sober when she makes the decision to stay with Ben rather than leave with her sister (not that this is a green light for sex, but certainly an indication of attraction). Perhaps we should see it as an unconscious foresight, predicting her later feelings for Ben. Perhaps it's a manifestation of unspoken sibling rivalry (I can still pick men up, just like that). Maybe it's just good old fashioned loneliness. My preferred reading is that she has subconsciously realised that her career move to being 'on camera' means that she has opened herself up to mass-objectification (in an earlier scene the top brass at E! have made it quite clear that her physical appearance is paramount). She has, in effect, made herself 'available' to the male gaze (and especially the gaze of the socially malformed frat-boy community that Ben represents) and so all she is doing is cementing this in sweaty reality. 


In these American films, the one night stands are corrected by pregnancy (rather than the more statistically probable S.T.D, as seen in The Last Days of Disco). Next up, I will look at a couple of European films, Claire Denis' Vendredi Soir and Jean Renoir's Partie de Campagne, that make their moral points in other ways...


For those interested Love with the Proper Stranger can be viewed here.

 

Knuckle Love: some notes on Punch Drunk Love

[This piece has been written for the Paul Thomas Anderson blogathon over at Jeremy Richley's marvellous Moon in the Gutter. If you haven't already done so, please go over and take a look.]


Barry Egan, having just found out that he will be unable to redeem the air miles he has collected in time to visit a girl he has just met in Hawaii, punches a map of the U.S that hangs on his office wall. He lays his hands out, stroking the keys on the adopted organ that sits on his desk. We briefly see the word L O V E crudely drawn into his knuckles, in what looks like a rudimentary homage to Robert Mitchum’s similar markings in The Night of the Hunter.

…

The provisional title for Paul Thomas Anderson’s follow up to the widely admired Magnolia was Punch Drunk Knuckle Love. Somewhere along the line the third word was dropped, in all likelihood due to its inelegant strangeness in what was already a very strange (but elegant) film.

Yet although knuckles were removed from the title, they remain a fundamental component of the finished work. Barry, despite being a business man, is very manually focused. His most significant actions are hand related: punching things, playing with his organ (pun intended). When Barry and Lena have their sex talk confessional his deepest desires are revealed thus: ”I’m looking at your face and I just want to smash it. I just want to fucking smash it with a sledgehammer and squeeze it”. Whereas Lena professes to crave more oral activity: “I want to chew your face off and scoop out your eyes and eat them, and chew them, and suck on them.” It is Barry’s hands that first get him into trouble. At home and lonely, he dials a sex chat line and gives his name as Jack (“Are you Jacking off yet, Jack?) At first he talks apprehensively with the girl, as he paces between his living room and kitchen, grasping his cordless phone. She tries her playfully seductive shtick “Do you like peaches, Jack? I’m a Georgia Peach”, before moving on to more direct imagery “I’m looking at my shaved pussy in the mirror”, but it is only when the subject changes to business that Barry succumbs to his onanistic drive, sitting down at his desk to perform the five knuckle shuffle.

I have often been struck by just how upright (or should that be uptight?) a filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson is. Boogie Nights, with all its porno-chic and genital flashing, is, at heart, a hymn to monogamous relationships and the family unit. In that film no transgression goes unpunished, and the same is the case with Punch Drunk Love. Barry’s moment of loveless self pleasure has severe consequences, and the resulting blackmail storyline serves as both a moral lesson and, perhaps, as a manifestation of Barry’s own guilt: “You thought you could be a pervert and not pay for it?”

Barry Egan is, I think it is fair to say, not very well developed sexually. Pointedly, his company manufactures toilet plungers (‘Fungers’) whereas his nemesis, Dean Trumbell, is a ‘mattress man’. Barry’s realm is the bathroom, whilst Dean’s is the bedroom. Perhaps we can choose to see this as evidence of Barry being marked by the anal stage of psychosexual development (which would probably account for the stockpiling of pudding).

Barry’s masturbation shame is contrasted by Dean’s revulsion at the very suggestion that he should do the same. The final showdown between Barry and Dean is instigated by Barry’s forceful suggestion that that Dean should “go fuck [himself]”. To Dean, this is evidently the highest possible insult, provoking something of an over exaggeration (“That wasn’t good. You’re dead.”) For Dean the act of fucking oneself is clearly the height of degradation. Indeed maybe we could see his whole criminal organization as structured around his punishing of the ‘perverted’ that masturbate to phone sex lines rather than pursuing their carnal interests in the sanctified space of the bed. Dean Trumbell is the Old Testament God, punishing Onan (Egan, Onan….hmmm) for spilling his seed. Perhaps.

Booze Vs. God (a response to Tony Rayns)

In October’s Sight and Sound, to accompany a touring season of films, Tony Rayns’ offers a much appreciated overview of the career of Hong Sangsoo. The article is both a good primer for those unfamiliar with the Korean filmmaker’s work, and an instructive analysis for those lucky and/or dedicated enough to have surveyed the oeuvre. In the last paragraph, Rayns takes issue with critics who habitually compare Hong’s work with that of Eric Rohmer’s. This is, in Rayns’ opinion, “lazy”.

Lazy critics compare Hong with the late Eric Rohmer, simply because both directors think a lot about methods of seduction and underlying sexual attitudes. But it is a false comparison, because Rohmer never surrendered his intellectual detachment and never put his own sensibilities at risk within his films.

Now, putting aside my suspicions that Rayns’ objection may be due to a less than appreciative view of Rohmer’s cinema as a whole (unforgivable, of course), I would still like to take issue with the dismissal. Accepted, the parallels between the two filmmakers could perhaps be overdone, and to view Hong as ‘the Asian Eric Rohmer’ is undoubtedly reductive. Both are very distinctive singular voices, but the reasons for the common association are not hard to spot. You only have to look at Rayns’ own bullet point description of Hong’s cinema as “smart, witty movies about likeable/fallible characters who screw up their relationships, drink too much and blurt out awkward and embarrassing truths” to see why people might choose to put the two side-by-side. Rayns’ concession that “both directors think a lot about methods of seduction and underlying sexual attitudes” only tells half of the story. We could add a preference for viewing their characters ‘on holiday’ and a continuing exploration of male anxieties in the face of sexually assured young women (not to mention the diary-like structure of Night and Day that so resembles many of Rohmer's works, and the recent inclusion of dream sequences, a tactic E.R used in Love in the Afternoon). There’s a lot more booze in Hong’s cinema, and a lot less God. But even the marathon drinking sessions that invariably crop up in Hong’s films could perhaps be seen as equivalents to Rohmer’s nightclub/party dancing scenes (in which developing relationships are put under the microscope) that became something of a signature in his later films.

The assertion that Rohmer “never surrendered his intellectual detachment and never put his own sensibilities at risk” seems bizarre to me. And if he is suggesting that the more overtly autobiographical nature of Hong’s work means that there is less distance between the filmmaker and his characters, I would point to Hong’s approach of using self consciously alienating tools such as fragmented or elliptical narratives (or, more recently, zooms) that have the effect of producing quasi scientific examinations of the doomed relationship in question.

Hong’s protagonists are generally filmmakers of a similar age to his own, whereas Rohmer chose to remain focused (mainly) on characters in their twenties (instead of going down the Woody Allen route of having his male characters age, while the romantic interest remains in suspended animation). But earlier on in his career Rohmer quite often presented characters with similar biographies to his own (My Night with Maud being the clearest example). As Hong’s career develops we will see which direction he takes.

Hong can be a lot tougher of the feckless males that populate his films, that much is sure. And the final impression we are left with is quite often far more bitter than Rohmer’s more forgiving denouements. But I don’t see why this should stop us from productively reading Hong’s films as critical responses to the Frenchman’s work, and in viewing the pair as one of the bickering almost-couples that they both like to prod.

Rayns concludes his article by offering what is, for him, a far more fitting comparison: that of David Bowie and his song ‘Always Crashing in the Same Car’. I have to say I’m a big fan of such feely associative readings, and, in this spirit I would like to offer my own musical equivalent to Hong’s cinema: the 1981 Dead Kennedys single, 'Too Drunk to Fuck’.

"Charlie is gay...I'm not gay" (notes on One Night Stand 1997)

To have suggested, back in 1995, that it would be Showgirls rather than Leaving Las Vegas receiving the full bells-and-whistles 15 year anniversary treatment, would have been opening yourself up to mirth, pity and possibly violence. Yet as Verhoeven’s film teeters towards respectability, Mike Figgis’s work is little discussed, and still in blu-ray limbo (well, it’s out in France, but you get my point). Ironic then, that it was the success of the former and the abject failure of the latter, that led to New Line Pictures offering Joe Eszterhas’s script, One Night Stand, (for which they had paid a reported $4 million) to Figgis with apparent carte-blanche to rework it as he pleased.

It’s hard to tell what remains of Eszterhas’s original script. Apart from some enjoyably over pronounced symbolism involving a leaking pen (“You’ve got a black heart” are Nastassja Kinski’s first words to Wesley Snipes) and the tried-and-tested device of having 'our hero' struggle with nicotine dependency. Equally, I don’t know how apocryphal stories are of a 64 page marathon mating session being the centre-point of the $4 million draft; but, much as I admire Figgis’s restraint, I can’t help but pine for what original director Adrian Lynne might have done with a more faithful translation. The titular sex in One Night Stand is a rather subdued affair, almost daft in its stillness, but the two leads are convincing enough to make you believe this furtive, hesitant lovemaking is the real deal.

The film begins as a knowing sexual satire, with ad-director Max (Snipes) addressing the camera, La Ronde style, as we join him on a trip to New York where the deed will be done, but before long the film will switch to a much darker tone. Contemporaneous reviews have identified the character of Charlie played by Robert Downey Jr as a Figgis addition. Charlie is Max’s dying best friend, the reason Max visits New York, and the link between the adulterous parties.

But how should we take this addition? The placing of an gay AIDs victim character to an otherwise breezy, knock-about straight narrative is a strange move, and, on the face of it, a rather brave one. Yet is it possible to come to other conclusions? Whilst the film seems to pride itself on its progressive liberalism (for starters the mixed race coupling of Snipes and Kinski, as rare in a Hollywood film now as it was 13 years ago) the plight Charlie might be seen to confuse this status, and negate any transgressive outcome (the apparent sanctioning of infidelity). It appears as if we are supposed to scoff when Charlie’s brother Vernon (Kyle MacLachlan) suggest that his promiscuous homosexual lifestyle made infection inevitable, “You don’t watch someone out playing in a minefield and not expect to hear an explosion, right?” but by placing the dying Charlie as the link between the cheating couple, the film is perhaps taking a similarly fatalistic attitude towards putting-it-about. Charlie’s death is the moral counter-weight that allows for Max and Karen’s unpunished sin.

The film could also be accused of being somewhat reactionary in its sexual politics. The controlled, wordless lovemaking of the Max/Karen union (shot mostly in restrained long and medium shots) is contrasted in the later sex scene between Max and his Chinese American wife (in mostly unforgiving close-up). Mimi (Ming-Na Wen) is a woman who knows what she wants and isn’t afraid to say it “circles, honey, circles...slower...harder” she briefs, as Max goes about his husbandly duties. When he tries to hush her moans as to not wake the children, her response is frank: “Fuck the kids, I’m coming!” How are we expected to react to this? Did Figgis (or Eszterhas?) include this to sway the audience back behind Max (his wife is a bit of an unhinged nympho, ergo it’s OK to cheat)? If so, this is surely a rather retrograde attitude towards female sexuality and servitude (Women: Know Your Limits!)By advocating the more chaste, submissive Karen over the forthright, horny Mimi the film could be accused of slipping into a rather conservative mindset.

The allure of the Catherine Tramell character in Basic Instinct was based on her perceived sexual dominance and ‘man-eater’ persona. ONS seems to play to the opposite fantasy: Max ‘saves’ Karen from an attempted mugging then (slowly) seduces her. This very unproblematic view of masculinity (saving the Princess, reaping the rewards) flies in the face of Eszterhas’ more exciting and dangerous tactic of having the male protagonist attempting (and failing?) to tame the unknowable, wild woman.

Of course Tramell’s flagrant bisexuality was another component of her sexual magnetism. In ONS sexuality is more clearly defined, but a slight question mark hangs over Max’s predilections. At one point he openly admits to kissing a man, but we are never sure whether this is just to provoke an irritating dinner party guest, or a honest confession (his wife seems surprised by the revelation).In his opening monologue Max is insistent on separating Charlie’s sexuality for his own (“Charlie is gay...I’m not gay...Charlie is gay”) and moments later Charlie mocks Max’s hetro lifestyle, referring to his wife as a ‘beard’. The previous best friends had a major falling out over ‘a work thing’ according to Max, but the film leaves room for us to speculate otherwise. It would be interesting to know if this ambiguity originated in Eszterhas’ or Figgis’ version of the script. If we take Max’s character to be bisexual, maybe the central switch is not Max choosing Karen over Mimi, but Karen choosing the sexually ambiguous Max over the more traditionally hetro Vernon...