Going Under

I just got this DVD and was very moved by the story. Some of the more squeamish reviewers would lead you to believe that the best thing about it is Roger Rees' physique. Yes, he's in great shape, but come on, there's a thoughtful and lovely story here. In fact, I'm very annoyed at some of the inaccuracies by the professional reviewers. Some were going for a witty pun or brilliant zinger, rather than a fair analysis of the film. Both of the main characters are engaging and likable but carry deep and unresolved hurts. They are gentle, good people searching for a way to heal themselves, or at least a way make it through each day with their un-exorcized pain. But the film doesn't wallow in boring angst – these are proactive people. Their journey together may be doomed from the start, but it was a good journey for each of them to undertake, and a step closer to the healing each craves. It's not really about the sex, and I think people who come to the film looking for a sex-thrill aren't going to get what they came for. And the people looking for a sensitive human drama might not choose it in the first place, thinking it would not deliver on that level. But it does. Actually, both characters are fully dressed and being themselves (to the extent they can) in the film's sexiest scene. People have criticized the ending, but I found it realistic, and more to the point, fully satisfying, if bittersweet. (If you've seen "The Ebony Tower" you may note some parallels.) It may be very hard to generalize how this film will affect people. If you're the kind that can't get past some of the subject matter (or if that's all you came for) you'll miss the forest for the trees. And it's a forest very worth seeing. I thought of the old quote, roughly translated as: "I am human, so nothing human is alien to me." Remember to bring your empathy with you to this film, and I think you'll enjoy a beautiful forest.

We have a therapist Peter, who is lost, and a mistress Suzanne who is emotionally constipated and a little bitter. Whether Peter is a successful therapist or not, who knows, the movie is cliché free, nothing is being force-fed to the audience. We're shown a real man, a man who like all of us was a child and had to grow up. Only Peter dreams of rebirth, that is what his sessions with Suzanne are all about. He gives up the reins in an acknowledgement that he has not got whatever it was he was looking for (not necessarily success, which is the cliché most American movies use), and he's willing to let someone else take over. He wants help, the way his mother helped him overcome his stutter when he was a child. Suzanne is an outsider, a girl with a foreign accent who became a pariah at school after fellating a boy who then told the whole school. Hers is a fantasy of control, and of detachment, a kind of revenge. The movie is a pavane, slow, delicate, intriguing, melancholy. A subplot which could be easily missed is Peter's daughter, who we never really see up close. She sends a postcard from Venice, a beautiful black and white photograph of the Bridge of Sighs. In the final shot of the movie she is paddling a bright yellow canoe up and down the river, at a distance. So what we have here is a man becoming a statue, slowly crystallising, the potentialities of life disappearing, clearly counterpointed by the life of his daughter. "Isn't it funny...", he said, "how once they tell you everything, and now they tell you nothing." Going Under is a very quiet film, there are no pop culture references, no special effects, no regurgitation. It takes place in an anonymous America, a place devoid of national sentiment. The movie is commenting on two individuals, not the state of the nation, and really not the BDSM community (we are shown a scene in a bar that really juxtaposes what goes on in the community generally to what is going on with out characters specifically, which is quite different). Quite how such a personal film ever got made I don't know, but I salute the filmmaker Eric Werthman for this attempts. It is clear that some of the movie-making is not professional, one example being that you can hear Suzanne and Peter talking in a car when the doors are closed and the camera is outside, this is a paradoxical sort of a scene where the status of the camera as interloper is compromised. Also the acting is not always wholly capable. But I think that the suspension of disbelief is never quite compromised.

The movie did not really do anything for me, I was not even the least turned on by what was going on on the screen. The movie is suppose to be about a man whose relationship with his dominatrix is about to end due to her retirement and he's attempting to get over this, by starting a personal relationship with her. This is where the movie side steps as the film becomes more about her life, why she's leaving the profession, and what got her there in the first place. It's not that the movie was all over the place it's just not what I signed up for and unfortunately the movie was not good enough to keep me interested after discovering how non-erotic it was. The only bright spot of the movie was the performance of Roger Rees as the married therapist who attempting to adjust with loosing his steady relationship with his madam. This was a miss not worth trying to catch.

First, I should say that I'm a big Roger Rees fan, which is why I sat all the way through the movie. I thought this film would be about a therapist who was curious about BDSM who goes to a professional dominatrix and winds up falling in love with her as he discovers his true sexuality. But instead this is a confused mess about a kinky therapist who is already involved with a professional dominatrix whom his apparently hip wife has been letting him see for over 2-1/2 years. The characters don't change and no one learns anything. It's just a mess of terrible acting, appalling dialog and a scrambled narration that tries to play leapfrog with the time line to somehow explain who these people are. In the movie I would have liked to have seen, the Rees' character would ultimately have had to confront whether he could be true to his sexuality and yet stay in his marriage. This is a very real issue that affects hearts and lives every day. Instead, Rees' character is this sniveling, sneaky bastard who takes advantage of his generous, open-minded wife as soon as she leaves the city to write. Any kinky guy who has that kind of good situation going would think twice -- hell, THREE times at least -- before jeopardizing it. Yet Werthman doesn't have his characters reflect at all. But then, Werthman couldn't possibly have written the film I was expecting to see because, from the character dialog alone, it's clear he doesn't know anything about BDSM psychology or sexuality. It's like he visited a couple of dungeons, went to a butt-wiggling bondage club to eyeball a spanking scene, and then dove into writing the script, ignoring the vast number of informative, well-written books on the subject. The worst part was that he failed to convey that people who practice BDSM are very much aware of the intimacy issues and tend to be very good communicators since they know that what they're doing is potentially dangerous, both physically and emotionally. Werthman had a chance to make a really interesting, insightful film plucked from a complex world. Instead, he blew it. God, I hope Roger Rees can make a decent film before he dies. I hated seeing his talent wasted on this.