Porn Theater and In the Cut
Many men should recognize this pre-millennium setting as metaphor, even though Nolot gives it particular gay meaning. He dramatizes a meeting place of horny stags, drag queens and transsexuals. Movies are the venue that occasion the release and inspiration of their libidinal longing, yet we see the characters pay only cursory attention to the big-screen heterosexual rutting that illuminates their prowl. More than a disquisition on movies or an exploration of fetishes, Porn Theater offers the rhythm and marvel and ordinariness of its characters' all-too-human compulsions.
Nolot's subject may be tawdry, but in depicting it he's come up with an extraordinary hybrid of Fassbinder and Jacques Tati. Note the power play of furtive-then-bold sexual negotiations taking place in the theater aisles and vestibules, and then check out the startling formality Nolot brings to these dark urban rituals. His camera pans the rows of seats: the isolated viewers, the random blowjobs, the shame-faced rejections. Porn Theater is a revelation in a culture that still ignores the salient facts of sexual life. It might very well be a great film. I'm certain that, despite the exploitation suggested by the title, it genuinely expresses the sexual questing of many people. That's an achievement one cannot claim for Jane Campion's In the Cut, a pornographic movie disguised as an art film.
High-minded Campion (director of The Piano and The Portrait of a Lady) has always pandered to low instinct. In the Cut is the latest example of the way she uses sexual paranoia to appeal to the weak-minded sympathies of feminist critics and audiences. Campion especially looks like a con artist in this, her first U.S.-set movie, because our women's struggle has moved far beyond the concerns that her New Zealand background mistakenly takes to be current. In the Cut is stuck replaying the complications of such 70s movies as Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Klute because they easily rub the soft-spots women still have about threatening, attractive men. Campion doesn't examine the peculiar detente that has occurred among post-women's-lib daters (boys and girls freely acknowledging the same physical hunger). This movie drags us back to once-simplified conflicts the same way horror movies repeat the fear of ghosts and goblins.
School teacher Frannie's (Meg Ryan) sexual frustration attracts her to macho homicide detective Molloy (Mark Ruffalo), who is investigating a series of sex-killings. They come together not through Frannie's primal instinct but through Campion's hackneyed fiction (she adapts the sordid novel by Susanna Moore). Campion is incapable of re-imagining how men and women relate in an age that is hyper-conscious of sex roles and social propriety. In Porn Theater, on the other hand, Nolot examines gay sexual habit?its protocol, suspicions and desperation?to the bone, to its essence. He conveys a truth about human desire that is relevant even to heterosexuals. At its best, Porn Theater resounds with the frustrations felt by the sex organs but that stem from social unease.
One of these movies is progressive; the other is not. Campion's film, with its big budget, celebrity actors and mainstream distribution, has a higher profile in the culture. But don't be deceived. It's Nolot's practically unheard-of queer feature that looks deeply, honestly?and with tender wisdom?into human sexual relations. His use of the porn theater (ironically named "Permanent") extends beyond the restriction Giuliani enforced by closing porn parlors in New York City. That clampdown obliterated one form of gay communion, coinciding with the private, anti-democratic home-video/internet revolution.
Yet Nolot's perspective is not nostalgic for a disreputable subculture; he recollects the coming together of male sexual anxieties. Porn Theater views gay culture politically, depicting the porn palace environment as an outlet convening men's repressed feelings. There are astonishing moments: a drag queen strides before the large, projected b&w imagery (her desperation mixing with a fabricated illusion), or an impromptu orgy that leaves one desperate guy jerking his small penis while seeming to fade out of a scene?an unwanted figure disappearing into the theater's flock and cupid colonnade wallpaper.
Unlike In the Cut, there's no pretense into suspense, violence and mystery?the commercial ploys that cheapen Hollywood movies whether it's Out of Time or anything by Mike Figgis (Cold Creek Manor being his latest softcore flick). Porn Theater is a genuine art film; it makes fascinating the various, defensive ways men express their repressed feelings?the contradictions of a gathering place that is as subject to misunderstandings between patrons as to police raids.
This complexity is no more than I expected from Nolot, best known as an actor in films by France's most radical contemporaries?Claire Denis, Francois Ozon and Andre Techine (for whom Nolot also co-wrote I Don't Kiss and La Matiouette). Yet, in spite of this pedigree, Porn Theater has gotten less media attention than Campion's film. I want to venture a possibly controversial reason why.
Feminism has garnered more favor in the mainstream media than has gay rights. This has nothing to do with correct thinking or sensitivity. As Jane Campion's movies demonstrate, it is the result of privileged insensitivity. When Franny meets a boorish police detective who brays, "I was on Christopher Street; about a hundred faggots wanted to suck my dick," she admonishes him ("Are you homophobic?") yet overlooks the cop's previous ugly racist sentiments. While professing feminist concerns, Campion uses In the Cut to wallow in sexual and racist paranoia. (Frannie reenacts her rape fantasies with Molloy, and her interaction with a black male student is worthy of D.W. Griffith.) Campion's a standard-bearer for the media's sexual and political status quo, and this has gotten her acclaim from less-than-conscientious critics. Through their own sexual prejudice, they sanction Campion's perversity and ignore Nolot's investigation of gay life because it still wrankles the mainstream?even though he's the finer artist and has made the far superior movie.
Porn Theater is the toughest French film about gay life since Cyril Collard's Savage Nights. Nolot's artifice?mixing role-playing with desperation?takes up the experiments and subversive conventions that Ozon has lately foundered. (The het mystery Swimming Pool has long outlasted its interest in theaters.) In Porn Theater, the Permanent Theater looks artificial, thus timeless. Many scenes turn into poetic demonstrations of the vagrant desire that forces men into feeling exiled. Nolot himself memorably portrays a medically untested habitue whose middle-aged life has witnessed the ravages of HIV and AIDS, yet he cannot stop himself from searching for stealthy satisfaction and distraction. (He calls himself a bee collecting honey.) He is encouraged by the ticket seller (Vittoria Scognamiglio), an Almodovar-type bisexual who watches the theater's comers and goers and flirts with the young projectionist ("He's hesitant, which means he's ready"). They exchange some exquisite insights on human behavior, including a poem by Nolot that may be the last word in aging-male sexual ambivalence.
All this is richer, more convincing, than the softcore fantasia Campion sells. She constructs a world with rampant sexual availability. It's predatory, ugly: Women describe a vagina violated with a hammer; Frannie's sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh) lives in an apartment above the Baby Doll strip club, unable to escape?or resist?sexual exploitation. And shots of the cop's investigation go from a decapitation to the image of an American flag. Campion calculates the grotesque as truth. Hysterical Ryan is directed to give a leaky performance?like Demi Moore in Ghost?and Ruffalo is both full-frontal nude and gross, his dirtbag eroticism recalling porn star Paul Barresi.
In Porn Theater, Nolot addresses the subject of sexual degradation with humane compassion; it is Campion who is vulgar and nasty. Franny's black student heroizes serial killer John Wayne Gacy, a vile detail that avoids the more relevant figure of race/sex killer Jeffrey Dahmer, proving that Campion is not really interested in sex or race or sociology. She mistakes depravity for realism. In Porn Theater, Nolot has miraculously seen through depravity to desperate human need. It's a classic film about pathos, yet when its main characters exit the infamous site and walk into the daylight?determined to know one another?it achieves something great: unsullied sympathy.