|
 |
"Every woman has a secret fantasy . . . every man wants to know." It's unfair to judge a film by its publicity, but unfortunately, this cheesy  marketing slogan for writer/director Troy Beyer's quasi-documentary Let's Talk About Sex says a lot more than you'd hope about the movie.
Jazz, played by the pixie-ish Beyer, is a young advice columnist with an idea for a TV show: real Miami women talking freely about "mating and dating in the '90s." She's under a tight deadline to put together a demo tape, so -- in the first of many wildly improbable scenarios -- her roommates, the gorgeous-and-needy Lena and the tough-but-vulnerable Michelle, drop everything and help her out.
Most of the footage for Jazz's TV show is "real" -- real Miami women whom Beyer really interviewed. Unlike the fictional characters, these women have skin imperfections; not all have washboard stomachs or sultry stares. Some hate it when men stare at their breasts; others love the attention. Some cry -- like one woman describing how it felt to be stood up on a date -- when they talk about how lovers have humiliated them. One woman describes how she hates it when she's giving a guy a blow job and he "does this": she demonstrates someone roughly grabbing her head and jerking it up and down. Such testimonials are so intimate they make us cringe with recognition.
Unfortunately the fictional parts of the film -- which take up a lot more time, or at least seem to -- make us cringe too, but for quite a different reason: they are preposterously unlikely. So much of Let's Talk takes place either in clubs or among club kids -- perpetuating the (tired) notion that true sexiness is hip and perfect-looking, youthful and assertive. (Madonna's friend and world-famous Miami club owner Ingrid Casares is thanked in the credits; need I say more about this film's milieu?) It's as if the women in the documentary sequence were judged too real for commercial consumption, so the film-makers had to throw together this Calvin Klein ad of a plot for better packaging.
Worse, the dialogue makes Bill and Monica's love-mumbles sound ingenious. In one terminally chic nightclub scene, shortly before  Michelle gets blasted on coke, she has an Eye Contact Moment with a cute bartender. As she's walking away, he stops her: "Hey, do I know you from somewhere?" Plausible so far. But wait. She turns around, gives him a sizzling glare, leans over the bar and whispers in his ear: "The next time you connect with a woman the way you and I just did, do not ask her if you know her from somewhere. Tell her you want to take her home and touch her in all the places her last lover never did." Oy.
Let's Talk has a weak concept and a weak script. But that's not all that's wrong with it. Despite its (very) cute lesbians and post-modern self-consciousness, this movie, like most of pop culture, has a blandly conventional take on women, men, desire and sex. In one scene, Lena says promisingly, "We've got to get beyond this Mars and Venus bullshit." But this movie is Mars and Venus bullshit. In the fictional scenarios, men are dogs in utterly hackneyed ways. In one scene, after sex the guy turns his back to the woman and gets ready to -- oh, doesn't this make us hopping mad, girls! -- go to sleep; when she says she wants to talk, he protests "I talked to you before I fucked you." Granted, men aren't geniuses at post-coital conversation, but really. Lena's on-off boyfriend only comes to see her for "booty calls" at 4 a.m. -- using his fictitious band's fictitious break-ups as an excuse for not calling her. The good guys are no more realistic -- and even less appealing -- than the bad. They fulfill the female characters' fantasies by doing things that would drive most women I know into committed celibacy: Jazz's boyfriend Michael provides her happy ending by surprising her with a ring and spray-painting "Jazz, Will You Marry Me?" on the side of his van.
Martians (at least the bad ones) may want booty but Venusians, as we all well know, want communication, connection and especially love. The three main fictional characters' search for True Love unconvincingly eclipses everything else, including Jazz's ambition and insecurity about her career -- at first rendered with painful believability (the film opens with her nervously fidgeting and smiling eagerly through an interview at the local TV station) -- which Let's Talk ends up reducing to a frustrated maternal impulse (she can't have children, for some unspecified medical reason, so she's driven to "create" in other ways). And in the most annoyingly Hollywoodish sort of resolution, it ends up being okay that she didn't get her TV show because she got her man (van included).
The "Mars and Venus bullshit" also affects the visual experience of Let's Talk. The film-makers clearly knew the male audience would want to see a lot more female than male skin, and they obliged. This will  probably make it less erotic for most straight women than it might have been. And since the lesbians, though crucial to the plot, aren't shown having sex, lesbians may be equally unimpressed. But even as old-fashioned wank material for straight men, Let's Talk About Sex's sex scenes are pretty limp, probably because the film-makers didn't want to alienate women by making them too pornographic (Venusians hate that). Thus the sex scenes end up looking like tampon ads with a Skinemax twist. Lost opportunities for real sexiness abound; for instance, when Jazz puts herself in front of the camera and says "I could come from kissing," the scene fades into a kiss between her and Michael (throughout the film, women's testimonials are illustrated by reenactments). I've never seen a movie in which a woman came just from kissing, so I was pretty intrigued. But -- surprise, surprise -- the reenactment just shows Jazz and her boyfriend smooching unremarkably; it's not even particularly sensual, much less orgasmic.
Sex is a big topic, obviously, so it would be unfair to take Beyer to task for not exploring issues like fetishism, public sex, group sex, S&M and STDs. But Let's Talk About Sex purports to go into the uncharted jungle of female sexuality, and still, for the most part, shies away from anything that's not already well-worn women's magazine fodder. A movie about men talking about sex would certainly have covered the turn-on and guilt of affairs; like it or not, women talk about this subject all the time. And not just about what scum men are for cheating, but about why we cheat -- or want to. And how about female ejaculation: Do we spray? How much? Doing what? How about pornography: Do we like it? What kind? Or masturbation: Where and how? How often? How long? While thinking about what? Let's Talk gives all this stuff short shrift, or leaves it out altogether.
These omissions have much to do with the messed-up premise that pervades this film, as well as most of pop culture -- the idea that women are fundamentally sexually different from men, always looking for love, while men always want to get off. What exactly is so threatening about the idea that everyone -- male or female -- sometimes wants all of these things? The dirty secret about women and sex is how much like men we actually are; maybe this is such an upsetting idea to men and women alike that we do everything we can to avoid it, including watching tripe like this.
|
For more Liza Featherstone, read:
Going with the Flow
Shocking Fuzz
Paradise Lost: Living in Latex
Let's Talk About Saving $8.50
The Art of Noise
Seduced by Casanova: The Psychoanalyst on the Lover
Circling the Threesome
©1998 Liza Featherstone and hooksexup.com
|
|
|
buzzbox
|
|
|
| partner links |
|
|
Hendrick's a Most Unusual Gin |
|
|
Get Paid to Party
Find out how at undercoverwear.com |
|
|
Buzzfeed
Puppies, Photoshop disasters, viral videos and more. |
|
|
VIP Access
This click gets you to the city's hottest barbells. |
|
|
