Luxury hotel.

Hal Portefield, the wealthy heir to a hotel chain, receives Rebecca, a dominatrix, a professional, the so-called mistress in BDSM practices.

Rebecca works for Lichter Heynes and Associates, and the meeting involves a preliminary step: filling out a form where the client must answer a series of questions about illnesses, any hospitalizations for addictions, age of first sexual encounter.

There is a contract to be signed even though the two seem to know each other well.

He places an order at the restaurant, and she organizes the documents in her business briefcase.

Recording is also expected, along with the start of verbal humiliation and physical submission.

No erotic scenes, much less pornographic ones: Rebecca does not touch or allow herself to be touched, it is not something physical but mental.

Rebecca takes off her blonde wig...

Nothing is as it seems, and everything appears as what it is not...

Everything happens in the enclosed space of a hotel room, like in the mental/claustrophobic space of the protagonists, one by choice, the other by profession, perhaps.

The roles never reverse, but Aristotelian metabolé repeatedly enters the story, although the much-anticipated final twist is certainly not the most surprising aspect.

Sex, contrary to what cinema and literature have accustomed us to imagine, is involved but only to a certain extent. These relationships go beyond, they are "mental penetrations" rather than physical ones, and for those who practice them, they are more engaging than traditional sex, which remains in the background or is absent altogether.

Who commands whom and what commands what...

Who commands what and what commands whom...

The game of voluntary servitude that sees the humiliated master "aware" in this case of their own humiliation, and the servant, hegelianly master of the master, but in turn a servant of the servant.

A game of amusing and intriguing interlocking, a frenetic and breathless film in the verbal and dialectical explicitness of a plot where the screenplay must be relentlessly perfect .

Fragments of a perverse discourse where the executioner and the masochist are two sides of the same coin.

A game of power, a gambling game in which it is permissible to get trapped and difficult to escape from, each through their own mania, neurosis, madness, strength, or weakness.

An existential fragility that seeks to fill itself through a dual sharing on which to build a more or less functional relational alibi.

A carnal dystopia without flesh, where the exteriority of bodies is sought to be reconciled with the interiority of an extreme and conflicting experience.

A film that offers an aestheticized portrait, at times cloying, where nevertheless "the idea that surface is superficial is a very superficial idea."

A relational confrontation built on an alternative marital experience, economically privileged, in which, however, one must play a well-defined role, that of erasing one's intimacy and subjecting oneself to the other, who becomes essential in constructing one's dimension of escape from an unsatisfying, routine, and banal reality.

The cinematic fiction portrays the relational fiction built on the need for the otherwise inexpressible expression of one's interdependence.

A sexual metaverse where chat is multidimensional and role-playing is pure virtual reality because dialogue and actions involve multiple protagonists, despite seemingly being just two, those two who only in "another dimension" have the courage to be "themselves" to the fullest, that depth that the real world must not see.

A psychological game to the slaughter, to satisfy one's response to an intimacy so intimate yet so exposed and artificial.

Zachary Whigan represents the surrealism of the drive because the drive enjoys in a surreal manner; he constructs an editing where the meta-script includes the script where the actors themselves are directors, actors, and screenwriters, caught up in the drive that is anarchy, lust, and non-reproductive excess; it is not at all a meeting of bodies but a clash of minds, where the surrealism of disordered sexuality triumphs.

Deception is the true protagonist, the mask the makeup, the performance an apparent mutable becoming already programmed by the market that imprisons the actors each in the image of the other, condemned by the presumed freedom of choice.

Sanctuary is a password and also the Sanctuary of BDSM, where the atrophy of mental organs surpasses that of sexual organs, and the sacredness of eros is lost in the labyrinth of reification.

22-May-2023 by Beatrice