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Between Last Tango in Paris and In the Realm of the Senses, Paul Verhoeven's "cacodemons of carnal pain." Eros and Thanatos right out of the gate, a zippy sexual vaudeville punctuated by murderous fantasies introduces the bohemian sculptor (Rutger Hauer) in the wake of a breakup. His match is the vivacious chicklet in daddy's Rover (Monique van de Ven), they meet in a roadside quickie that ends with the overworked prick in a zipper, coup de foudre. A bit of Bande à Part at the church wedding, smashed china for the honeymoon. Continuous arousal informs the ménage, visceral and frenetic and oddly innocent in its smearing of fluids. Semen, blood, piss and shit figure voluminously in the rebuke of the antiseptic chasteness of A Man and a Woman and Love Story, the exaltation of inflamed flesh is bound to the confrontation of its rot. Danaë for the muse early on (thumb-sucking bare figure, crimson sheets, candles), later Persephone "the goddess of the underworld" (a floral bouquet on her bosom leaves a trail of crawling worms). Jan de Bont's handheld camera brings whirling effulgence to beachfront walks and bathroom spewing alike, and as a bonus there's a charming Carry On tribute during the Queen's visit. "What matter if the ditches are impure?" (Yeats) The life of passion inevitably burns itself out, girl stuffs herself with deathbed sweets and boy is left with statue and wig. A Rilkean posture ("I fuck better than God"), a parallelism with Russell on artists and genitals, "an acquired taste" for meat (cp. Spetters). "Surrender to the impulse of the heart" is the characters' rule, Verhoeven honors it by magnifying ribaldry into poetry. With Tonny Huurdeman, Wim van den Brink, Hans Boskamp, and Dolf de Vries.
--- Fernando F. Croce |