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In the year of Klute, a merry tour of the Red Light district. Blonde Greet the unsinkable redhead (Ronny Bierman), a versatile thespian in her stage but also a strict entrepreneur, adding machine ready at hand. Customers come and go, each with a specific fantasy: To shiver under the covers before the skulking witch, to get caned for goosing the professor, to don apron and duster and little else for the demanding mistress. Outside is a grimy-effulgent storybook Amsterdam, upstairs the collega (Sylvia de Leur) who "couldn't make a canary cum" and fends off a brutish beau (Jules Hamel). Tentative romance with a married client, "a domestic guy" (Piet Römer), otherwise a twirl with the aspiring rooster whose valise bulges with feathers. (The session is scotched when the girls peep where they should have clucked, a jest remembered by Polanski in Bitter Moon.) "Is this a bad time, madam?" Paul Verhoeven's feature debut, a ribald sketch (cp. George Grosz's "Policeman and Prostitutes") and already an all-pervasive raid on good taste. Domestic rows morph into gladiatorial bouts, loudly munched chocolate at the opera is enough to end a relationship, all part of a satirically heightened worldview where "normal" life means marriage to a disinfectant salesman. A gentle art in a land of transactions, cinema in other words, yet Verhoeven has nothing against the sundry deviants who seek the muse, desire to him is funny like that. Fake blood for the surgery fetishist (he scolds the woozy heroines for amateurishness), real tears for the courtesan's closet melancholy, swiftly dried before the next assignment. "Oh dear, she's got goosebumps!" Russell's Whore is the only possible capper.
--- Fernando F. Croce |