sex

KAYMAK: ménage à trois times two

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Sara Klimoska in KAYMAK. Courtesy of Kaymak.

Kaymak follows the relationships of two couples in the same apartment building in teeming Skopje, North Macedonia. Eva (Kamka Tocinovski), a rich banker, lives in the penthouse with her husband Metodi (Filip Trajkovic), who wants a child; Eva, not a candidate for Mother of Year, doesn’t want her life disrupted by the bother of pregnancy and childbirth, so she plucks a young relative, Dosta (Sara Klimoska), from the countryside to serve as a surrogate. Dosta is developmentally disabled and lives with her family in an impoverished, backward village. Soon, Eva and Metodi are getting more than they expected and more than they can handle.

The other couple lives in a modest ground floor apartment. Caramba (Aleksandar Mikic ) is a goofy security guard; Danche (Simona Spirovska) is always exhausted from pulling double shifts at a bakery. Day to day drudgery has drained their relationship of passion, and Caramba is always on Danche’s very last nerve. When Caramba meets the comely and oversexed cheese vendor Violetka (Ana Stojanovska), their lives, too, are upended.

The characters have lots of sex, both joyously kinky and cringingly transgressive. It gets very funny, and Manchevski even drops in a delicious nod to the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone.

Ana Stojanovska and Simona Spirovska in KAYMAK. Courtesy of Kaymak.

However, Manchevski imbues Kaymak with more meaning than a mere sex romp, exploring both the imperative to parent and the elastic strictures of of monogamy. There’s tragedy (and apparent tragedy) here, amid all the absurdity. Manchevski told A Good Movie to Watch, “People usually want their films to have a consistent and predictable tone. Now, my preference as a film viewer, but also as a filmmaker, is more adventurous. I don’t mind disruption. On the contrary, I cherish it.“

All the characters, rich or not, enjoy kaymak, a versatile creamy milk reduction used in the Balkans as an appetizer, a condiment and a fast food breakfast. 

Manchevski was Oscar-nominated for his acclaimed 1994 Macedonian feature Before the Rain. That Manchevski debut won the Golden Lion at Venice and was singled out as a masterpiece by Roger Ebert and The New York Times.  Since then, Manchevski has been teaching in New York and directed an episode of The Wire. 

Kaymak is his third film to play Cinequest, after Bikini Moon, my choice as the best film of the 2017 Cinequest, and Willow, a triptych that plumbs the heartaches and joys of having children. Kaymak is the raunchiest and most overtly comedic of the Manchevski films I’ve seen

The performances in Kaymak are all excellent. (Klimoska bears a passing resemblance to Kristin Stewart.)

Cinequest is hosting the US premiere of Kaymak. Find the trailer on the Cinequest Kaymak page.

SEXUAL HEALING: gentle naughtiness and sensitivity

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SEXUAL HEALING. Courtesy of Slamdance.

The Dutch documentary Sexual Healing traces the experience of Evelien, a 53-year-old woman, afflicted from birth with spasticity, who needs substantial assistance to live independently. Evelien has never enjoyed sexual fulfillment, and now she’s curious. Sexual Healing follows her quest with sensitivity, gentle naughty humor and taste.

Evelien has supportive friends and the good fortune to live in the Netherlands, where there’s an agency established to fill this need for the disabled, essentially a therapeutic escort service. If you’re like me, you’ll be surprised at the age of Evelien’s sex therapist.

Sexual Healing is the second 50+ minute feature for writer-director Elsbeth Fraanje.

[Note: I advisedly used the word ”spasticity” to describe the subject’s disability, to avoid the term that the film uses, “spastic”; in researching the appropriate language, I got no useful guidance from the various sources wagging their fingers at the use of “spastic” but offering no alternatives more specific than “disabled” or “differently abled”.]

Slamdance hosted its US premiere, which I highlighted as a MUST SEE in my Slamdance: discovering new filmmakers. Sexual Healing was programmed in Slamdance’s Unstoppable category, a “showcase of films made by filmmakers with visible and non-visible disabilities”.

CURIOSA: erotic, but do we care?

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Noémie Merlant and Niels Schneider in CURIOSA. Photo courtesy of Memento Films.

The French romantic drama Curiosa is set in the Belle Epoque, when the Eiffel Tower was new and sexual liberation was burgeoning among literati.

The saucy Marie (Noémie Merlant) is in love with Pierre (Niels Schneider), but marries the more financially established Henri (Benjamin Lavernhe). Pierre is a libertine (and, if British, would have been called a “rake”). Pierre returns to Paris from Algeria with a girlfriend unencumbered with inhibitions and an obsession with erotic photography. Marie instantly begins an affair with Pierre, and, boy, does she start losing her inhibitions, too.

Merlant and others spend much of Curiosa in various states of undress, so much so that teenage boys will have difficulty fast forwarding between them. Impressively, the distributor was able to find and cobble together 1 minute and 38 seconds worth of mostly clothed action. for the trailer below. It bears mention that Curiosa was co-written and directed by a female filmmaker, Lou Jeunet.

The characters are “based loosely” on the writings and photographs of real literary figures. We do know that Marie de Heredia married Henri de Régnier, had an affair with Pierre Louÿs and posed for his erotic photographs.

The cinematography by Simon Roca is beautiful, and this movie filled with attractive, naked people should be more engaging. The problem is that it is difficult to relate to or care about any of the characters.

I streamed Curiosa from Laemmle.

DTF: an unexpected descent from prurience into menace

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Documentarian Al Bailey and his subject “Christian” swiping though Tinder. Photo courtesy of DTF and Gravitas Ventures.

In all fairness, the wild and unpleasant DTF is not the documentary that filmmaker Al Bailey planned to make. Bailey wanted to explore the world of dating apps by following a heavy user of Tinder as he coursed through a series of casual hook-ups.

Bailey thought he had the perfect subject, his friend Christian, a widowed, globe-hopping airline pilot. Bailey expected to harvest lots of prurient fodder from the horny Christian’s meeting and dating lots of single ladies across the world. And Bailey, who had introduced Christian and his late wife of 14 years, justifiably thought he knew Christian.

But Christian had become an altogether different person, not just a party hound, but someone who had descended into a vortex of sex addiction, depression and substance dependency. And when Christian is drunk, we see a despicable torrent of misogyny and racism.

“Christian” is not the pilot’s real name – and his face and voice are obscured throughout the film. If identified, he would certainly lose his job because DTF documents alcohol and drug use that violates the restrictions for long haul airline pilots.

“Men behaving badly” has become a genre of its own in narrative cinema and even documentaries. DTF is not that. Christian’s behavior is not just hedonistic, but jaw-droppingly dangerous to others. He is not just a jerk, but a public menace.

Now Bailey is not blameless here. There are several cringe-heavy moments where Bailey reneges on promises to Christian and his dates to stop filming them. And Bailey tries a Michael Moore-style ambush of Tinder’s corporate HQ, a tactic that I despise even when Moore or 60 Minutes deploys it. And there are moments where Bailey and his colleagues debate the ethics of continuing when the film itself may be prompting Christian toward even more risky behavior.

Sometimes I’ll watch a movie and feel like I need to shower afterwards. After DTF, I felt like I needed to dive into a pool of disinfectant. DTF is available to stream from on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu and other platforms.

Cinequest – Four Lovers: those French sure are open-minded

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Today and tomorrow, I’m catching up by commenting on two films from last week’s Cinequest 22.

In the thoughtful French film Four Lovers, two happily married couples hit it off socially.  They quickly decide that it’s okay to have sex with each others’ spouses.  It’s not “spouse swapping”.  It’s an arrangement whereby both couples continue to live as couples, but each adds a permitted fling with one of the other couple.

Plenty of explicit sex follows, but this is not primarily an erotic film.  Instead it explores what follows from this arrangement.  What rules need to be agreed upon? Is there jealousy and/or insecurity?  Will anyone go past the fling to fall in love with the new partner? Can one be in love with more than one lover?  Can they keep this from their kids?  How deeply do they need their new lovers?  How will this affect the original marriages?

It’s all complicated.  In fact, I think that watching this movie would be far superior than trying this out in real life.

Spoiler Alert:  After the arrangement ends, the couples return to their original married lives.  Something is missing in their lives, but it’s not the sexual thrill of the affairs.  Instead each grieves the loss of a lover.  Given this loss, all four are unhappy for the first time in the film and perhaps wishing that it had never happened.