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The eponymous heroine's modesty/abandon contradiction might be that of pornography itself, where the physicality of the screen meets the passivity of the audience. Déjeuner sur l'herbe, handheld camera behind the bushes. "The whole nature trip is just so... groovy." "Aw c'mon Mona, let me put it in you!" Coitus interruptus as she (Fifi Watson) reminds her beau (Orrin North) of her untouched virtue, elsewhere she's a rapacious fellatrix eager to unzip a stranger's pants in a back alley. A recalled still-life (pigtails, dolly, Victrola) elucidates the oral fixation, the tip afterward is turned down: "I didn't do it for money! I have a taste for these things." Michael Benveniste directed the dialogue sequences, Howard Ziehm the screen-filling, pink abstractions. Much of their work has a disarming directness, as when the severe widow (Judy Angel) greets her future son-in-law at the door in transparent camisole and garter belt—there's enough fumbling, unchoreographed heat to the coupling to make it unexpectedly moving when a surge of Wagner's Das Rheingold trumpets their climax. Also intriguing is the soundtrack, especially as it drowns out dialogue with harpsichords, ukeleles, electronic dissonance, and, in a scene that brushes ever so gently against Kiarostami's Shirin, the disembodied voices of Taylor and Burton as The Taming of the Shrew unspools in a theater. (The filmgoer in the dark is so rapt that he at first doesn't notice the wanton opening wide next to him.) The tale has a mock-moral, and the wink of a new genre. "You never know what kind of people are in movie houses nowadays." With Susan Stewart, Calvin Victor, and Gerald Broulard.
--- Fernando F. Croce |