... doesn't mean I can't deal with reality.
There seems to be an argument that if you find realistic cinema too "confronting" then you have issues with the real world and need to face it. No, you don't. You watch a movie to enjoy it, and I don't enjoy scatological humour. Period. And speaking of which, yeah maybe limit your period representations as well. Painting a girl's pants with a spot of ketchup doesn't endear me to your movie either.
I got insanely mad at a movie called Anatomy of a Love Scene and its absolutely ridiculous, unrealistic plot. It involved a director who was so obsessed with the romance cultivated between her two leads during the original shooting, and who is now so depressed by their breaking up, she concocts a completely stupid excuse of having to reshoot the sex scene to get them back together. Stupid. Unrealistic. No director in their right mind would waste a whole crew's day, AND pay for craft services, just to reunite a couple. I was in a fit of rage with this premise, adding to this the characters themselves were unbelievable in the truest sense. The couple in question spout tropes from any romantic film about a couple who's broken up - including "you're just like your piece of shit alcoholic mother" - and the leads no actual dimensions other than one suffered panic attacks and only the alcoholic one could calm her down. Thin plot, thin characters, thin premise. And I'm left ranting about it to all and sundry because it was riddled with cliches and contrivances. And by the trailer, I'd assumed it would be quite good. No. God awful.
Then I'm watching Netflix's Duck Butter, (a theme I missed because I wasn't engrossed in the story and had to look up on Urban Dictionary later), and I'm onboard until one of the romantic leads is belting the other with a bag of dog shit for her depressing and VALID diatribes on the state of the planet, then I'm almost tapping out. In another scene she's legitimately cussing out a bunch of boomer lesbians for leaving her as a millennial to pick up the proverbial tab on the state of the planet, and it's all, oh go be a young person and dance, why should we care? Patronising. I give this thing a chance, and it decides to present me with human shit instead. Really. Now I've skipped through the last scenes to the punchline (spoiler: fuck relationships and get a dog instead). I wanted to support this as a lesbian love story with its realistic representations of lesbian eroticism and sex, but when you've shot a scene where one lover farts in the other lover's phone so she can email it to their ex boss, who'd fired them that very day, then you're smash cutting to a bedroom scene involving the fired girl's head up the farting girl's ass, I'm less convinced. Worst case of juxtaposition I've seen. It had its moments of dry humour, but when you're almost shoehorning in a four-way, and one of the leads is just annoying, clingy and has an unbearable accent, you're still not convincing me. Your premise had me interested, your opening scenes had me interested. Then you threw animal and human (albeit fake) shit into the mix. And I'm asking, why didn't the depressed girl lock the fucking bathroom door before the psycho manic pixie barged in there? Suddenly I'm skipping through the last ten minutes of your Netflix "masterpiece".
Please don't go there. I give one movie the pass for that bollocks, and that's Henry Fool, I forgave it since it's not that graphic, just stupid, and it was discussing scatological humour in Simon's poetry. You don't need to show me the actual (fake) shit. Leave that for Divine and John Waters. (Pink Flamingos being another film I never saw all the way through as we ran out of lecture time, but at least knew the final scene. That was intentionally grotesque. You don't need to marry experimental comedy with grotesque comedy). And if you want to say, oh you don't understand the point, believe me, I do. You've already made it abundantly clear by this point by illustrating the leads still piss and shit anyway. We understand you want to represent reality in all its facets. Someone sitting on a toilet with basic "toilet foley" is plenty.
I get why Sex and the City also grappled with this, I think it still made its point without being vulgar. You wanted to represent a realistic lesbian romance, and the scope of a realistic relationship. But you ruined it with realism.
As a side to this, I did like Blue is the Warmest Colour initially, but after hearing complaints from its target audience, and finding out the two actresses were subjected to arduous hours of simulated sex with fake vaginas, the film loses a lot of impact. It's a beautifully shot film, it does explore an intense relationship based on passion and shades of obsession. But it failed to represent its subject matter accurately and now people are viewing it with this afterthought of, oh maybe we don't get how lesbians work in bed. If I were gay, I'd be madder. But ironically, my gay friend was just, "yeah, we could've told you that."
Oh and BIG PS: I made it to the end of A Serbian Film, and still couldn't finish Duck Butter. Consider that my argument ender.
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