sexuality
The Duke of Burgundy is that rare thing that almost every movie promises, yet fails to deliver: it is something that you’ve never seen before. It manages to say something universal about the politics and gender roles of relationships using the guise of lesbian sadomasochism, a subject I assume will be entirely alien to most viewers.
In an article entitled “Why It’s Important to Make More Diverse LGBT Films,” fellow Film Inquiry writer Cherokee Seebalack lamented: “Where are all the LGBT romcoms at?” Where, indeed.
With the blockbuster success of Fifty Shades of Grey in cinemas worldwide, many pundits are claiming that this marks a new era for “sex positive” movies – and much more importantly, the basic idea of a woman being as sexually open as her male counterparts not being a source of cinematic shame, but one of pride. It has only been two decades since what I dub the “unofficial Michael Douglas misogyny trilogy” of Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct and Disclosure hit cinemas, films that (like Fifty Shades) were successful due to their frankness of sexuality. Yet those movies were inherently misogynist in suggesting that women were mentally unstable, or just plain evil for daring to be as open about their sexuality as men.
Fifty Shades Of Grey, it’s not often that so few words can spark so great a societal reaction. And to be honest, it is because of this very reason that I went to watch this film. I didn’t read the books, I didn’t care to.
Last year, Denis Villeneuve directed one of the most pleasant surprises of the year with Prisoners, an unrelentingly tense film about child abduction that presented intriguing moral questions while also providing satisfying twists and turns throughout. That filmed starred Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal. Gyllenhaal has teamed up with Villeneuve again in Enemy, a much smaller and much, much more mind-bending film than Prisoners.
Escape From Tomorrow is a nightmare in black and white. From the opening moments to the final scene, the story unfolds in the most mind-bending ways. I grew up with very little black and white film.
This movie is part of the Spanish Film Festival, which takes place during May. As one of the many films chosen to play at the Spanish Film Festival in 2014, Three Many Weddings (original title Tres Bodas De Mas) is a wild Spanish-language romantic comedy following a month in the life of Ruth (Inma Cuesta), the puppy-eyed lab scientist longing for love. When Ruth wakes up one morning from a drunken night of random love-making, she is faced with three wedding invitations – all from ex-boyfriends.