Destricted (2006) Reviews

• large brown slugs and very long breasts need not be feared

  petcrows2006-01-23

  The film contains some shorts about sexuality and pornography. At first we are presented with what looks like a gigantic brownish slug. It was not with shock & horror that the giant darkened slug was viewed by the audience. Rather, the giant slug was greeted with amazement and laughter. The giant slug turns out to be the thankfully in-tact penis of a man who is suspended within a gigantic machine he was making love to. Thankfully the man's penis and testicles aren't torn off by the shaft of the machine, as some lubricant and plastic are present. In another short we get to see a young man play doctor with a nice regular looking female. The innocence and humor are poignant. In another we get to see several young and old Balkan women. They either stand and sing with their breasts showing, or they ran around in traditional frocks briefly flashing their vulvas. We also learned about Balkan sexual folklore, such as how their men used to put their penises in holes drilled in wooden bridges so as to prevent impotence. Several other fascinating and funny tales are told. Another great short starts with several young men being interviewed to be in an adult film. Each talks about their experiences with exposure to porn, and each ends up showing their shaven packages. The showing reveals a certain vulnerability and common humanity between them. Eventually the short producers choose one from the group, and he then gets to interview prospective women who're going to be in the supposed adult film within the short. He ends up selecting the forty year old woman - a lady who is outrageously overt toward him, and who most strongly fits the stereotype of an impish porn star. The key things revealed in the short are: the vulnerability and tender commonness of human sexuality; the silliness which comes from all the fakery present in regular porn; what it's like for a young male who's been exposed to porn to finally get to have sex with a porn actress; and the strange mix of beauty and silliness that is present in commercial porn. The short wasn't really "porn" itself, it was an effigy of it, a clearly focused full color shadow or impression or view, a clear caricature illustrating what commercialized porn is: some beauty; some realism; some fakery; some pandering; some silliness; some crassness, although there was no crassness in the short itself. In another short we see several less-than-a-second shots from various porn films. In another we see a panning shot of the breathtakingly beautiful Death Valley and a man masturbating on the ground there. His struggle for release and his subsequent exhaustion is shown. In another we see a man and a woman separately watching adult films and masturbating in their own separate bedrooms. Our view of the movie flashes at about seven times per second, and there's repetitive music and faint baby cries heard. We see the young man screwing a plastic doll. We see the woman with her fingers up her vulva. Each are alone. This short illustrated several things including that even when we are having sex the experiences we're having are our own. In a final shot for the film a line of men in presumably Balkan costumes are all standing with their erect members, which slowly deflate as we all watch. One audience member comments "concentrate" in an attempt to help the men maintain their stature. Here's the impressions I was left with after the entire film concluded: 1. That porn and open expressions of human sexuality in film should not be feared. Those who fear it simply haven't seen enough of it. Seeing enough helps one realize what porn is. It's not a substitute for real in person interaction. Some couples in western countries use it to help enhance their real in person interactions. Some individuals use it to either help educate themselves about the functionality of human sexuality, or to "get by" during times when they're alone. What is revealed through extensive viewing of humans having sex, in whatever context, is that there is beauty and strangeness and silliness. Everyone has their own tastes. Some more educated more sensitive types probably prefer material which is less crass and more authentic. More real, and less directed and less micro-managed. More true to life. Also, a lot of exposure to such material does not result in moral degradation. Rather, it results in several things. In part we come to see human sexuality as something akin to the work in a sausage factory. To a birth. To a biological process we get to observe & participate in. To joy, pain, strangeness, a recognition of our connection with all organic life. It's all skin on skin. Flesh on flesh. It's living. Get used to it. 2. That authentic expressions of human sexuality in movies should be celebrated. I'd personally rather see independent films focus on such things, because most anything Hollywood touches turns to crass commercialized crap. So, films like Caligula, Intimacy, 9 Songs, the works of Tinto Brass, and the Pier Paolo Pasolini films such as The Decameron, and The Canterbury Tales - all these films, and this most recent film Destricted, are revolutionary in that they show: That what some of us fear and loath need not be feared, when stared in the face. 3. The human sexuality is pedestrian and beautiful at the same time. Common. Tender. Personal, but public as well. Experientially individual and shared simultaneously. Sometimes intimate and sometimes detached. Overly hyped by some. But not valued enough by others. At Sundance '06 some of us got to stare a huge slug in the face. The slug moved. The slug grew. But in the end, we found it was just a part of being human and being alive.

• More vulgar than artsy

  Imdbidia2011-02-08

  Destricted is a reflection on sex, sexuality and x-rated movies trough seven director's approaches and stories - Marina Abramović (Balkan Erotic Epic), Matthew Barney Hoist), Marco Brambilla (Sync), Larry Clark (Impaled), Gaspar Noé (We Fck Alone), Richard Prince (House Call), Sam Taylor-Wood (Death Valley). The only film that really stood out was "Hoist", which is a very innovative idea, and very well filmed; however, the images of the crane/perforating machine and their real drivers with their faces pixeled rested credibility to the piece. I mean, those people don't add anything to the "story" and, therefore, their presence was unnecessary. If the director really wanted them, why not using actors with unpixeled faces? I found very interesting "Balkan Erotic Epic", a mostly ethnographic piece, which tells the viewer about how sex is embedded in traditional oral culture in the Balkans. The film mixes surreal beautiful images with schematic animation and the director addressing the viewer with pieces of information. It felt like a pastiche, some of the art in there wasted. "Impaled" departs from a good idea and exploration of the adult industry. The director put an add on a newspaper searching for candidates for an amateur sex movie. The guys are interviewed on camera and talk about sexuality and adult movies, and show their bodies and genitals to the camera. The director chooses a winner, who then has to interview different adult actresses, see their naked bodies, and choose his favourite for fulfilling his sexual fantasy, in this case having anal sex. The interviews were very interesting, and also listening to the actresses talking about what they do. The problem with the doc is that ends being gross and vulgar, filmed as cheaply as an amateur cheap adult film would be, but without the naturalism and feeling of real amateurs having sex in front of a camera. Noe's "We fcuk alone" is a big disappointment. His overuse of strobist images is completely unnecessary, and ends being the whole point of the "story" not what happens in it. Without the strobist approach, the film might have been more confronting and interesting, especially if you have something to say about sex. The strobist images in a continuous way, during the whole piece, made me feel sick and, therefore, nothing of what was happening in the story was interesting. Fcking alone and hallucinogen unsettling images are put at the same level. "House Call" is an adult sex movie, old style, but straight forward nevertheless. No artistry there, either. "Death Valley" is just a dreadful piece with a guy massaging his willy in the great outdoors... Where is the artistry? Finally, "Sync: is a very short pastiche of sex images, taken from x-rated films mixed with powerful music. The movie, overall, has two main problems. The first, and the most important one, is the lack of artistry, despite what the authors and producers intended to. Secondly, the film mixes apples with bananas, so to speak, documentaries, with pieces of fiction, with straight x-movies. In other words, sex is the only common thing. But sex is a too-wide subject to make a movie about unless you set boundaries and decide which aspects or themes you want to explore. As a result, there is not harmony in the movie, as the different pieces are patch-worked and not jigsawed into something bigger. This would have not mattered had the pieces been filmed with artistry and talent, which is rarely seen. Perhaps, a series of short documentaries/films on specific concrete sexual themes would have been more effective. The movie ends being a gross pastiche of vulgar images, with hardly artistic value and creative talent, which supposed to be the point of the same.

• Porn for art students, boring for the rest of us

  noizyme2010-10-17

  I feel that I somewhat gave this DVD some disservice by fast-forwarding through most of it. I'm rather tired of people over-analyzing sex on film as potential for art. I think it would be more original to produce a series of paintings made by couples covered in paint, screwing on top a canvas. What we get with this collection is an offbeat tale of a village and their exposition of breasts and bums, a guy and his fetish for rubbing himself against moving machinery, a rather well-done collection of spliced sex scenes one-after-another, an interview of several individuals for a trial-screw for a porn actor's first experience on camera, a jarring, strobe-lit piece on a guy defiling a doll and a girl getting it on with a stuffed doll, a scene from a porno, and a guy beating off in the desert. That's it, no more, no less. This is the UK version I watched, so the scenes do change with the US version, but the idea is the same. I don't know if the idea was to shock the audience into understanding that sex can be artistic, but it didn't work on me. I've seen far sicker things multiple times, so the shock factor definitely isn't there. As for the art of it all, the only piece that I would expect to see in a museum of any sort would be Marco Brambilla's "Sync," the spliced-sex scenes. The rest of this really loses me, and it's a shame more women directors were not on-board for this project because, although the results were laughable, Marina Abramovic's "Balkan Erotic Epic" was, at least, different from the others. For the work put into each one, I gave that an extra star than I would have if this was some college hack work, but they spent some time with this, even if the results were confusing and boring.

• Interesting but failed experiment

  rbverhoef2007-03-03

  'Destricted' is best described as seven short art-house porn films. None of them really succeeds as an interesting mix between art and porn, although 'Impaled' by director Larry Clark and 'Balkan Erotic Epic' by director Marina Abramovic have some interesting elements. The first shows a casting for a porn film, but not with the insecure women often displayed, but with insecure young men. The second shows myths from the Balkan around the sexual organs which makes a rather funny erotic little film. 'House Call' (from Richard Prince) is a vintage sex scene and comes, together with 'Impaled', closest to pornography. Maybe 'Sync' (Marco Brambilla) as well, but it only exists out of very, very fast cuts from different porn films and plays for about two minutes. 'Hoist' (Matthew Barney) is too much art, which becomes rather ridiculous with the sex, and 'Death Valley' opens with a beautiful shot only to continue with an 8-minute masturbation scene. I guess it does catch the essence of contemporary porn. I have not mentioned Gaspar Noé's 'We F*ck Alone' where he seems to have made a stylistic sequel to his controversial 'Irréversible'. His use of the strobe makes this one quite hard to watch. The film itself, including a doll as a main character, becomes unintentionally funny. His film feels as a failed experiment, basically like 'Destricted' as a whole. The premise and some elements have their interesting things, but I can not think of a real audience for it.

• More contemporary art than contemporary cinema

  Chris_Docker2006-09-24

  (Due to the 1000 word limit I've trimmed this review by over a third: apologies if some of the notes on films in this seven-film collection are therefore rather brief.) Andy Warhol once said, "An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he - for some reason - thinks it would be a good idea to give them." Destricted doesn't fit into convenient mainstream or even art-house niches, but is more like a Tate Modern exhibit. It would be hard to identify a 'market' for the film, yet it is undoubtedly of some merit. Destricted is a collection of shorts linked by a common theme. Two of them are directed by acclaimed film directors and the other five are made by heavyweights (two of them women) from the world of contemporary art. All were invited to make films on their views of sex and pornography. The films in Destricted are mostly iconographic or impersonal fabrications. They distil essential elements into images that remain long after they are viewed. Each uses different artistic techniques, and each is worthy of serious study - although cinema audiences' reactions may also include boredom and amusement. The most accessible section of the film (and the most linear in format) is Impaled by Larry Clark. Clark examines the effect pornography has on youngsters, but his film goes further, looking at the human dynamics and insecurities of the porn industry and making a porn film. He interviews young male pornstar wannabees, in discussions that are almost like a shrink session, asking them about their sexual experience, preferences and use of pornography. One of them is a virgin. Many have quite understandable hang-ups about their bodies. Asked what sort of things they would like to do, they all express an interest in anal sex. When they undress, nearly all of them are shaved. These last two characteristics, although only evinced by a minority of the general population, are frequently the norm in pornographic films. The female porn actors interviewed are shown as human and genuinely sensual (unlike the way they are portrayed in porn films), although their comfortable attitude to sexuality threatens to bring out more of the guys' insecurities (a theme that was also explored well in Breillat's Sex is Comedy). The girls prove mostly adept at putting the young man at ease however and he selects the oldest of them (40yrs) to be his 'co-star'. Clark avoids the pitfall of making the film funny or sterile or missing the eventual sex scene. The result is a documentary about porn that is also seamlessly pornographic. The sense of dislocation is felt even more strongly in House Call by Richard Prince (a twelve minute section). Almost an homage to a golden age of porn, Prince takes the naughty doctor-patient fantasy stereotype but reprocesses his film until the image quality is overrun with graininess and bad lighting. To this, he adds jangling, futuristic music so that, even though the images are very explicit, we are reduced to observing them in a distant, dispassionate way. Hoist, the fifteen minute contribution by artist Matthew Barney, will be no surprise to fans of his acclaimed Cremaster Cycle. Barney develops cryptic, intricate symbols that draw you in to their artistry long before you decipher them, whether in Freudian or any other terms. He is a very visual artist and can be extremely unsettling, perhaps in the way Dali is. At the start of Hoist, we are not sure what we are looking at. It could be a slug. Very slowly it grows, like a painting that slowly changes. Gradually we become aware that it is in reality something very different to what we had expected. It is a human penis. The ultimate, dystopian contrast occurs in an onanistic union with a deforestation machine. Balkan Erotic Epic by Marina Abramov is thirteen minutes of amusing but quite instructional scenes re-enacting ancient sexual rites for fertility, warding off evil and the like. It also provides some of the most memorable images, such as the bare-breasted woman repeatedly clutching a skull to her chest in the closing credits. One of the scenes - where men are seen from above, lying face down and copulating with the earth itself, is reminiscent of the work of the photographer Spencer Tunick who stages vast public gatherings of naked people around the world. Sync by Marco Brambilla is the shortest contribution at less than 2 minutes. Brambilla uses sensory overload in the form of clips, each no more than a few frames in length, from typical hard core features. The resulting choreographed collage (set to loud drum music) is like being hit over the head with Dante-esquire force by images that once would have appeared sexual or arousing. Death Valley by Sam Taylor-Wood is eight minutes long and puts a Marlboro man type character in one of the hottest infertile places in the world where he 'spills his seed'. Taylor-Wood's work often has the human figure isolated on film, as if she views the body in its most revealing moments as a work of art in itself. Death Valley conveys the loneliness and stigma attached to self-stimulation and is uncomfortable, almost homo-erotic viewing. Gaspar Noé provides one of the longer segments with We F*ck Alone at 23 minutes. As with his earlier Irreversible, he uses strobes and a heartbeat-like thumping background score to create sensory disorientation. At one point a man puts a gun in sex-toy doll's mouth as he copulates with it. The scene maybe suggests the danger of sexual repression symbolised by solitary pleasure - if the psyche is unable to negotiate normal sexual relations with another person it tends towards force and a desire for dominance. The title is a play on the title of the director's first feature film, I Stand Alone (Seul Contre Tous), a controversial story about despair and loneliness and the resulting sexual pathology.