Review by Beatrice On 30-Aug-2024
Why does man have this horrible ability in his nature to enjoy more acutely when he is aware of harming the creature from whom he derives pleasure?
Romy has a beautiful family, she is a wealthy CEO of an automation and robotics company, her husband Jacob loves her while she fakes orgasms and retreats to murky porn sites.
More or less reluctant to start a tainted extramarital affair with a young intern who senses her dissatisfaction and reconciles it with his own, she risks losing everything—dignity, career, family, and identity.
All of this is flavored with soft S&M encounters, which she tries to resist but is obsessively drawn to.
Elegant, beautiful, seemingly skillful yet extremely fragile, unresolved, and powerless.
Samuel, the young lover, a bit sadistic but perhaps "just" a perverse narcissist, tries to compensate for his need for domination to escape from who knows what existential specter.
Scenes on the edge of improbability with hints of the ridiculous redeem the arduous journey in the last 15/20 minutes of the film's real turning point:
a sort of pop and mainstream Eyes Wide Shut where she, no longer Alice, in the face of her own and others' ignorance, asserts her autonomy, her disoriented yet aware gaze of an unconscious, unpredictable, uncontrollable, irrational condition.
A realization that comes in extremis when the film finally turns to irony and puts the male on the spot!
She takes what she wants, what she doesn't know, what she welcomes, while they, husband and toyboy, abandon themselves to the testosterone-fueled clash of rival, brainless possession.
Each with his unresolved or unresolvable fragilities, each with his perversions, between power, unmentionable pleasures, self-harm, and more.
Not taking oneself too seriously is the only option, at least when it comes to sex!
After all, she is a babygirl but learns to play by her own rules.
It takes moral courage to suffer, religious courage to enjoy
30-Aug-2024 by Beatrice