Lies: An S&M Pic With All the S&M Cut Out

Review No. 1:

Ours is a jaded age. We've read and re-appropriated de Sade and von Sacher-Masoch. We've been revolted by then revered Bad Lieutenant, Salo, and the entire Saw franchise. We've censored Mapplethorpe and Serrano photos only to institutionalize them later. In that context, there's something almost quaint about Lies, a Korean doomed BDSM romance about a sculptor (Lee Sang-hyun) and a high school student (Kim Tae-yeon) half his age. Is Jang Sun-woo's Lolita scenario intended to shock us? Are we supposed to get upset or outraged by dialogue that has to do with spankings, eating shit, and underage phone sex? Does the casting of non-actors and the use of a handheld camera speak to authenticity or budgetary constraints? Visually tame (with a glimpse of a man's butt and little else), Lies is a potty-mouthed representation of a cinematic cliche: a sexual fantasy involving a middle-aged man and a young woman barely out of puberty. Snooze.

Review No. 2:

I should've suspected something was up given the 52-minute running time. Too long for a short and too short for a feature, Amazon Prime's version of Lies struck me as an oddity. In truth, it was a false representation! This streaming aberration of what is actually a graphic depiction of a BDSM relationship has excised 20 minutes of welts, bruises, skat and God knows what else. Do the explicit sections add up to a totally different experience? Likely so. Am I sorry I didn't get to see the uncut version? Well, yes and no. I'm definitely a bit annoyed that Amazon Prime is serving up an abridged version — of a movie that's garnered a few international honors — without labeling it as such. Then again, having seen Bad Lieutenant, Salo, a few Saw flicks, and more than my share of torture porn (Egads, how I hate that I ever saw The Butcher), I'm kind of relieved that my memories don't now include snippets from a dirty art film showcasing asses being tendered by sticks, leather straps, and wires. Relieved. But not thankful. False advertising may be our culture's dirtiest crime, after all.

Venus in Furs: Masochism Never Goes Out of Style

If the movies are any clue, Leopold von Sacher-masoch's 19th-century novella of power and perversion Venus in Furs is eternally, internationally relevant. As the years go by, filmmakers continue to be drawn to this twisted, tawdry tale for inspiration, again and again: There's Roman Polanski's French/German film based on David Ives' Broadway play, an Italian version (Devil in the Flesh), two Dutch versions, Monika Treut's bisexual Seduction: The Cruel Woman, and an American B-movie made in the '60s for under $9k. There's also this odd Korean entry, which looks to be indebted to much that came before. It's got the director/muse setup of Ives' hit drama, the sadistic revenge of the Italian pic, even the low-rent esthetics of the American flick. Based on the less-than-glowing critical reception of most of its predecessors, I'm going to hazard a guess that this Venus in Furs is also furthering a shared tradition of bad acting. It seems unlikely the "camp" quotient would have originated here.

To be fair, it's not easy to deliver a line like "I want to be your slave" (while pouting on your knees) or "I want to be famous" (while writhing in the midst of foreplay) without causing a fit of the giggles. What made Ives' theatrical script such a revelation was his understanding of how constantly the tables turn in BDSM relationships and how much of the associated torture is actually psychological. Unfortunately, writer-director Song Ye-Sub never gets beyond a surface examination of the dynamic. As the mistress with the whip, Ju-won (Seo Jung) has all the power. As the puppy in the dog collar, Moon-soo (Baek Hyun-jin) keeps getting degraded and losing control. His eventual graduation to sadist doesn't really make sense within the current framework but since his self-annihilation tendencies don't really gel either, you're not so much confused as unsatisfied come his final transformation. Call me shallow but I was much more interested in the costume changes and the various wigs worn by the movie's world-weary dominatrix than in one man's rebirth as a bully.

Role Play: Three Characters in Search of a Novel

Novelist Jung-ho (Lee Dong-kyu) has an unconventional creative process. He likes to act out and photograph potential narratives as a way to generate new material for each of his books. For his latest pseudo-memoir, he invites Hye-in (Han Ha-yoo), a student who attends the university where his wife Ji-soo (Kim Jin-sun) teaches, to come over and dress up like an orphaned female cousin on whom he had an unhealthy crush and who committed suicide after being raped by local boys. The role playing only gets weirder from there. He insists Hye-in memorize a poem then do certain things to enrage his wife (like having sex while the Mrs. is preparing a meal for the three of them in the kitchen downstairs). Hye-in is surprisingly acquiescent. She's what you might call a seriously devoted fan who'll do anything for an autograph. But even her zealousness pales when compared to that of Ji-soo who, one easily suspects, is gulping down antidepressants largely because her self-worth is constantly being undermined by a husband who demands his muse undergo all forms of psychological torment -- and anal sex -- because that's what leads to his most productive writing sessions out in the country. (He couldn't give a damn that his bucolic existence has added over an hour to her daily commute.)

Is the novel any good? I'm guessing it's pulp. Jung-ho himself admits it's melodrama (and with its penny dreadful ending you'd be hard pressed to disagree). As to Bak Sang-yeol's Role Play, which can feel like the cinematic equivalent of a Russian nesting doll with all its stories within stories within stories, it careens from a self-conscious artiness to a lewd soft-pornography (with soft jazz accompaniment) and from Hitchcockian thrills to Ed Woodsian nonsense. As a representative of a genre best referred to as "titters and tits," Role Play is best viewed late at night with irreverent friends willing to crack wise and leave you alone if you fall asleep. Which isn't to say Role Play will put you to sleep. It just won't keep you awake either.

House With a Nice View: Bad Girl Teaches Something to Good Girl and Vice Versa

Graphic sex tends to disqualify movies from serious discussion. Show too much breast or butt early on and a flick is likely to be labeled as porn, regardless of whether it continues to show skin or not. And while I'd hardly say A House With a Nice View is filmmaking of the finest caliber, Lee Soo-seong's indie movie is definitely not just faking a story when all it wants to do is show naked people going at it. Sure, his two lead actresses -- Ha Na-kyeong and Kwak Hyeon-hwa -- are more bodies than brains, but his dialogue, with its periodic references to Neitzsche, is definitely flirting with deeper topics than anal penetration. Despite a couple of raw encounters (one which blurs out the male genitalia), House With a Nice view doesn't become more salacious over time but instead retreats from nudity and naughtiness to more sobering realities: Ha's real estate agent gets raped by a prospective buyer while Kwak's timid apartment dweller realizes that stripping for a nearby Peeping Tom has made her a source of ridicule for her neighbors.

Lee's not that hot about exploring these darker areas though. He's for happy endings of every variety. The square architect (Oh Seung-tae) will prove a faithful lover to his slutty paramour; the hunky neighbor (Lee Geon) will return just in time to meet the budding needs of a nerdy pen pal. As such, House With a Nice View is definitely overly simplistic and a bit of a letdown. Quoting from Thus Spoke Zarathustra may sound thoughts but it doesn't give a movie weight. Yet to say Lee's flick is nothing but talky trash is to ignore that, corny-porny parts aside, this film is a heck of a lot better than a trite horse racing pic like Lump of Sugar or a mean-spirited gore-fest like The Butcher. Why look down at a movie that strips its leads physically, and then tries to psychically, even if the attempt fails? Why not enjoy the ways of the flesh? To paraphrase Neitzsche: "To dismiss soft-core movies is to suffer, to interpret soft-core movies is to find some meaning in the suffering."

Forbidden Quest: Making Some Noise for Love, Sex, and Literature (a.k.a. Porn)

I believe that while watching Forbidden Quest this past weekend, I said the sentence "This movie is good" aloud three times, the word "wow" twice and the expletive "shit" (appreciatively) once. These were not the only times I was moved to speak, and as I'm sure my dog Silas would attest (if he could), I am not in the habit of talking to the TV. When a movie gets me to sound off in private, something unusual is going on. And Kim Dae-woo's directorial debut Forbidden Quest is unusual: an 18-century historic drama about a populist pornographer with artistic aspirations.

Funnily enough, the first involuntary sound the movie caused wasn't an appreciative word or a sigh of pleasure. It was the barked laugh that erupted when one government thug (Lee Beom-su) pulled out a red, hardened bull's cock as his weapon of choice to protect a court intellectual (Han Suk-kyu) tracking down a forgery. That inflamed billy club came as a hilarious shock to me as did the calligrapher (Kim Ki-hyeon) copying porn in the back room of the shop which the scholar was investigating. Does it naturally follow that said scholar would try his hand at writing erotica or become the lover of the queen (Kim Min-jung) who'd become his muse? Probably not. But Kim's script isn't about the probable. It's a warped fantasy about what happens when porn becomes an obsession, even centuries before you could get it online by the touch of a finger.

There are plenty of interesting questions raised by Forbidden Quest about honor, betrayal, love, intimacy and sex and how they interconnect. Compare the very obvious sacrifice made by the eunuch (Kim Roe-ha) to be near the royal lady to the torture the scholar undergoes to hide the identity of his illustrator. Love isn't a trifling affair for anyone here. I didn't clap, alone in my apartment, for Forbidden Quest when it was over. But I did shed a silent tear which spoke volumes, some of them quite dirty.

Texture of Skin: Memories of Other People Having Sex

Porn has a reputation for being both forgettable (because it typically doesn't invest much in its story) or unforgettable (because it sometimes shows explicit acts that you may not be able to get out of your head afterward). There are skin flicks that evaporate upon ending and there are skin flicks that stick in the memory until you're dead. Which brings me to Texture of Skin, a truly boring yet memorable piece of soft core Korean erotica that I saw nearly a year ago on cable TV. The movie's lasting power isn't completely due to lead actor Kim Yun-tae's truly beautifully muscled ass, although it doesn't hurt either. It's really more the movie's final scene in which Tae's character, a photographer having an extramarital affair with an old friend (Kim Joo-ryeong), faces a bedroom mirror in which he encounters not himself but a topless woman. Upon first viewing, I had vague ideas of what that jarring reflection might mean: something about identity or haunting or gender fluidity. I know that flashbacks of a rape were part of the story but to be honest, Texture of Skin didn't hold my attention most of the time so I easily missed most of the clues.

And is it really worth thinking about? A brief investigation online reminds me that a car crash figures into the plot as does a random rule that states the two main characters have agreed to have sex only nine times. But I can't say that brings me any closer to understanding that final disjuncture. Soft core movies pretend to have stories but generally speaking they're just porn with greater distribution potential. It's hard to believe that director Lee Sung-gang really felt he had a tale to tell. Then again, his filmography is hardly a list of smut. He's the same writer-director behind the animated feature My Beautiful Girl, Mari, which, while not a favorite of mine, surely reflects artistic aspirations. Do Lee and his stars, Tae and Kim, all think of this as an art house pic? How did Lee get actors with lengthy resumes -- Myeong Gye-nam and Lee Dae-yeon -- to appear in cameos despite the salacious nature of the script? Like the topless woman, these remain mysteries to me.

If you're looking for something a little racy, I'd say try Hera Purple: Devil Goddess, My Heart Beats, or hottest of all, A Frozen Flower, a movie that actually made me blush. (The dangers of seeing a movie with a former personal trainer are hereby documented.)

My Heart Beats: Feminist Professor Finally Gets Laid

My Heart Beats is a freaky little piece of hypersexual filmmaking. Creepily voyeuristic with a zombie like performance at its center, this oddly heady skin flick is all about a depressed, middle-aged professor (Ryu Dong-sook) who, in the midst of preparing for a feminist class on erotica, decides that she must get into a porno film since she's so desperate to get laid. (That's definitely one way of doing it.) Lucky for her, she's got a sassy old frenemy (Byun Yi-yeon), who runs a video production company specializing in skin flicks. After dieting, exercising, studying the Kama Sutra and punching herself in the stomach to beat out her damned spare tire, this academic is deemed ready to take it off and get it on! Her hobby in humping has begun.

To protect her tenure though, she wears a series of Mardi Gras masks as does her first sex partner (in life and on camera). He's an impossibly hot -- and presumably mute -- young man (One Tae-hee) with many strange scars on his chest, that resemble pink putty leeches. Coincidentally, this masked stud is so many years his on-screen lover's junior that he's actually looking to get into a college to become a professor himself. Call it serendipity. Eventually, I suppose they'll be able to say they've taught each other something deep.

Learning is a painful process, sadly, and since this is basically soft porn with a story, the only happy endings for these characters are the ones captured by the film within the film. Actually, those aren't very cheery outcomes either. But outside the celluloid fantasy, the instructress loses her job, the gigolo loses his heart, and the self-styled auteur (Kang Seok-ho) deciding the camera angles loses his artistic control.

It's worth noting that My Heart Beats is directed by a woman: Huh Eun-hee. Because of that perhaps, there's lots of staring at crotches instead of cleavage, and a couple of minor male characters (Lee Dong-hyun and Ahn Sung-gun) who never disrobe but have killer pecs. Also, the Cinderella-type transformation of the movie's heroine is about an odd duck becoming a more attractive odd duck instead of a bona fide swan. I liked that. I also got a kick out of the fruity symbolism in which the protagonist goes from learning to bite an apple, to learning to share a peach, to learning to give a pomegranate without expectation. Kooky but sweet.

Sweet Sex and Love: To Penetrate Is To Bore in Softcore

I admit it. I just watched a porno movie. Mind you, Sweet Sex and Love doesn't know it's pornography. It thinks it's an art film because it never shows genitalia and has its two main characters come to a melancholic end. (Grief would be too dramatic!) But any flick that shows this much pheromone-sweating skin in this many Kama Sutra positions is a skin flick. Let there be no bones about it. So while there's execrable dialogue between the various bonks in bed rooms, living rooms, kitchens, public and private restrooms, and cars with sunroofs in the middle of a rainstormy night, plot still takes a back seat to penetration and product placement for underwear.

As to the steamy story, apparently the big hump that the two horn-dogs have to get over in their relationship is her resistance to anal sex. Well, some problems even a good handful of lube will never solve. I suppose when your bond is built on fornication, that inability to take it like a man is as good as any reason to throw in the towelette. Being forced to swallow someone's ejaculate on a long bus ride could be another. Cheating with an ex-boyfriend who's about to get married would be a third.

It's easy to see why these two aren't destined for the quaintly creaky S&M dungeon of a brothel-turned-retirement-home. Their attraction may be intense -- and physically rewarding -- but it's also completely superficial. When the tough times rear (and "tough" means sex getting more coercive and post-coital dialogue growing more passive-aggressive), the only memories they have to fall back on inevitably grind on each other's nerves. Visions of your partner's butt are unlikely to keep you invested when your lover turns out to be a pain is the ass. "I'm a sex machine and hung like a horse," says Dong-ki (Kim Seong-su). "I'd grown bored with his penis," says Shin-a (Kim Seo-hyeong). "People this hot and this shallow simply shouldn't be happy," say I. With me, director Bong Man-dae seems to agree.

Despite its racy, just-shy-of-XXX nature, Sweet Sex and Love tarnished neither of its lead actors' careers nor typecast them as sluts. Kim Seo-hyeong went on to major roles in reputable scary pics like Black House and Voice, while Kim Seong-su resurfaced in even better fare: The Red Shoes and Monopoly. Not art exactly. But much closer. Does anyone know if Korean film has a casting couch?

Five Senses of Eros: Speak No Hot Sex, See No Hot Sex, Hear No Hot Sex

Memorable short films? I don't know many. Memorable short erotic films? I don't know any. The enervating anthology Five Senses of Eros didn't change that fact either, especially since there's actually not an arousingly erotic short in the bunch. The opener, Byun Hyuk's "His Concern," is a grating voiceover accompanied by images charting the first stage of a romance resulting from a chance encounter at a train station. (She's way too good for him even if he is played by matinee idol Jang Hyuk.) Number two -- Hur Jin-ho's "I'm Here" -- isn't much better: a twee 20 minutes of a husband (Kim Kang-woo) and wife (Cha Su-yeon) playing hide-and-seek even after she ends up dying of something or other. (This woman likes to spoon even when she's gone!)

On to the third mini movie "33rd Man" which gets more pornographic by kicking off with a naked humping couple undone once the ghost (Kim Gyu-ri) appears. She's not really a spook, mind you, she's simply an actress on a shoot with a frustrated director (Kim Su-ro) and an experienced leading lady (Bae Chong-ok) who oddly enough happens to be a bisexual vampiress. By film four, things get weirder and dykier. With Min Kyu-dong's "The End and the Beginning," now we've got a bitter, horny widow (Eom Jeong-hwa) who decides to shack up with the magician-girlfriend (Kim Hyo-jin) who her hunky husband (Hwang Jeong-min) was banging when he got killed in a car accident. (Just wait until she finds those S&M videotapes.)

Last and least erotic if most interesting is Oh Ki-hwan's "Believe in the Moment," a fragmentary little flick about six incredibly edible young things who confusedly swap partners as they struggle to find out the meaning of intimacy. Lots of kissing! No nudity! I've actually seen previous films by many of the writer-directors featured herein but I don't feel that any of them qualify as an auteur just yet. This project probably appealed to them as something to do before they got to work on a more serious project. Maybe they're auditioning actors. Maybe they're testing out cinematographers. Maybe they're trying to flesh out an idea about carnal desire or the eros-thanatos connection or a dream they once had but don't remember too clearly anymore. Maybe that's it. But only maybe.

A Frozen Flower: This Love Triangle Is a Fading Pink

My heart goes out to this King (Ju Jin-mo). He needs to sire an heir to protect his kingdom but he can't get it up for the Queen (Song Ji-hyo) or his concubines. My heart also goes out to Hong Lim (Jo In-seong), the King's male lover and bodyguard. After being enlisted to impregnate the Queen, he fatally discovers that he's got a taste for the ladies -- as one 69 scene graphically illustrates. And because I've got a big heart, my heart also goes out to the Queen. Horny and unhappy, she's trying to make the best of a bad situation. Which, for a time, she does. (After being pimped out by her Lord and Master, she falls head over heels for the royal sperm donor and demands that they do it again and again in as many different positions as possible.) As love triangles go, Yu Ha's costume-drama/softcore-melodrama is ingenious in how it inverts a familiar forbidden love setup by having the straight couple sneak around while the gay man gets bitchy and suspicious. If A Frozen Flower might seem to side with the straights, it also illustrates that whether you're hot for men or women, everyone loves to kiss with a lot of tongue.

Hera Purple - Devil Goddess: Mounting Olympus Again and Again

Didn't sexploitation go out in the '70s? Hasn't easy access to porn online made soft core obsolete? Apparently not. In Jeong Kil-chae's delightfully trashy Hera Purple (2001), one amnesiac rape victim (Kim Chang) goes under hypnosis then shifts shapes to seduce then castrate naked lithe young men doomed to perform a Kama Sutra of death for her revenge. She makes one man stand upside down, another do backbends, and a third do some serious gymastics in a door jamb, all in the name of the orgasm. A fourth (or is he the fifth?) copulates with her underwater with nary a breath. Her husband isn't killed coitus interruptus but afterwards, he does end up incoherent in the bathroom where he... Oh, it's absurd. This part you've got to see to believe. That said, a priest who tries to escape her magic touch (which causes instant arousal) can't run away once she's buried her face in his rear. Her final victim? Her psychiatrist. No. That's not true. It's the gay cop she takes from behind. The police detective who finally tracks her down turns out to be her long lost brother so his fatal gunshot is a bittersweet moment during which she sings a childhood ditty about a potato and a flower. Zeus protect us!