"Erotique"
                             A film review by
                           Linda Lopez McAlister
                           on "The Women's Show"
                         WMNF-FM (88.5), Tampa, FL
                             January 21, 1995

   The film I want to review this morning is called "Erotique." It turned up
first at the Sarasota International Film Festival last November. Now it's on
mainstream screens in the Tampa Bay. The appeal of this film was that it will
give us a chance to see what three accomplished women filmmakers from three
different countries do when given the opportunity to make a short erotic film.
For that's what "Erotique" is, three short films about sex: "Let's Talk About
Sex," by U.S. filmmaker Lizzie Borden, "Taboo Parlor" by German director
Monika Treut, and "Won Ton Soup" by Australian Clara Law. It is so rare to see
films depicting female sexuality that hasn't been filtered through some man's
idea of what female sexuality is like, that this seemed to be a good idea.
Let's let women filmmakers create films that show their ideas of what's
erotic. Sounds like a good idea, but something has gone wrong between the idea
and its realization and, at least for me, "Erotique" turned out to be more of
a turn off than a turn on. What went wrong?

      For one thing, what could have been a feminist project of celebrating
female sexuality, turns out instead to be pretty unfeminist. (Don't get me
wrong, I'm not arguing the line that we all have to like the very same brand
of politically correct sex. I recently read and hated Sheila Jeffrey's book
The Lesbian Heresy because of it's dogmatic insistence that 1970s era
lesbian/feminist vanilla sex is the only acceptable form of feminist
sexuality). But I do find it pretty disappointing that each of these three
erotic films by women seems, in its own way, to be built around a masculinist
conception of sexuality. What a lost opportunity!

    The Lizzie Borden film, "Let's Talk About Sex," is about an aspiring
Chicana actor who supports herself by working on a call-in sex talk phone
line. There are lots of clever details worked into the mise-en-scene and the
script that I appreciated: the great Chicano wall mural of Delores del Rio on
the side of a building, that fact one woman with a really sexy voice who
works on the phone line is a heavy-set grandmotherly type who sits and knits
as she talks dirty.

  But the fact remains that most of the alleged sexual fantasies acted out in
the film are the ones made up for the purposes of turning on a man who
keeps calling in--so they're at best her fantasies filtered through what she
thinks will turn this man on. When he stops calling she finds herself obsessed
with him and acts out a power fantasy of her own on this guy with the help of
her friend, a lesbian cop. You can't deny that power has been eroticized in
our society, but instead of buying into that, I'd like to see a film that f
inds ways to work against it. I kept wishing we'd see an erotic scene between
the two women rather than the rather dizzy (and dizzy- making thanks to the
camera work) sex scene she has with the call-in guy.

   If Borden's film buys into the eroticization of power, Treut's goes in for
the eroticization of violence in a big way. In many ways her "Taboo Parlor" is
the most completely realized and well structured of the three films, but if
you complain about mainstream films like "Basic Instinct" for their message
that seems to equate lesbians with man-hating killers, you'll really hate this
one. Again, there are some individual moments in the film that are
fun/interesting (the two women and the man they pick up being very sexual in a
public bus, for example, or Marianne Saegebrett, the German hausfrau from
"Bagdad Cafe" turning up in a whip-wielding cameo), but overall the number of
people that find this film really erotic when all is said and done and
you know what the deal is, must be pretty small.

    The third film, "Won Ton Soup" by Australian Clara Law has the advantage
of having a sense of humor. Alas it isn't even told from the woman's point of
view (as the others, at least, are). This is about an Australian man of
Chinese heritage but essentially white in his acculturation in love with a
Chinese woman. Because she doesn't think he's Chinese enough a friend in Hong
Kong shows him an ancient Chinese sex manual. When his woman friend returns
from a visit to her home in Shanghai he demonstrates his new found cultural
knowledge--all thirty variations!  That's basically about it.

   It's hard to know what audience this film was geared for. Not feminists.
Not lesbians. Not straight women. Not men (some actually walked out after the
Monika Treut film whose anti-male violence certainly could be a turn-off).
Maybe it's for those sexual libertarians who put a high value on having as
much and as varied and exotic sex as possible.

For the WMNF Women's Show this is Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film.

Copyright 1995 by Linda Lopez McAlister.  All rights reserved.  Please d
not reprint or reproduce this review without permission of the author.