Review by Beatrice On 20-Aug-2023
THE STORY OF ADULT CINEMA: PORN AS SEEN BY A CHILD
"For men, X-rated movies are beautiful love stories where all the terribly boring parts have been cut out."
A hot scene; it is the screen on which porn films are shown every day for the colorful and sometimes crude addicts/customers of the genre. We are in a 1970s Canadian movie theater, the owner Al dies, and his son Wayne receives the entire building as an inheritance where the porn theater is located and where, on the upper floors, bizarre and outcast tenants live.
Wayne is a nonprofessional actor and does not intend to continue his father's professional legacy, and a real estate developer hints to him that a developer is interested in buying the whole building and turning it into an uncredible business. The difficulty will be convincing the tenants to vacate the premises also because Wayne quickly understands that his father Al was seen by the residents as a kind of benefactor.
Impatient customers continue to knock on the door to attend their daily screenings while a young boy with Down syndrome comes to the cinema to perform his favorite daily activity: vacuuming the entire cinema.
In between difficulties dictated by his inheritance and between his desire to be an actor and the difficulty of resurrecting the memories of a young boy growing up with a father who ran a red-light movie theater, Wayne finds himself thrown into a world he has unknowingly removed and rejected and the need to track down why he had removed and rejected it.
He begins to give in to this new reality; he begins to see his work as an actor in a different light; he begins to associate with that world and the people connected to it; he begins to brush up on old anecdotes he experienced in childhood; he begins to remember and interpret with the eyes of an adult the experience of a little boy who loved his father.
He thus revisits the viewing of some films and breaks the limits of his prejudice and wanders through blow-up dolls, black holes and hilarious experiences of autoeroticism with a television set.
The film's grotesque at times horror irony also involves young Athar, a young immigrant boy who lives, mostly alone, one of the building's apartments, making him play the part of himself as a child. Yes, Wayne decides to make a film about his childhood, through which he will resurface his unknowing porn-experiences, unintentionally experienced, from which his father tries to protect him: a carefully removed anecdote gives insight into why he will be removed from his parent.
This film, presented in the After Hours section of the Turin Film Festival, manages to mix in a technically crafted way the reality of porn theaters that have now completely disappeared (www.cinematown.it/2019-05-storia-del-cinema-porno/) with the existential experience of the protagonist grappling with his childhood and his first role in a soft-porn film.
The Last Porno Show represents for the director the need to tell, as in his previous films, "non-traditional characters, situations and themes in a character-driven narrative style" and to resort to out-of-the-box figures or people on the margins and eccentric. Kire Paputts also claims to have been turned down by all major Canadian film institutes who would not understand the product and to have resorted to nonprofessional actors and improvisation through unexpected and unscripted moments to produce a film with Arts Council grants, crowfunding and personal savings.
A quirky story told in the traditional way; the sometimes melancholy image of a vanished cinema, which one could only feel nostalgic about with respect to what web porn has become.(www.ilpost.it/2012/04/07/i-numeri-del-porno-su-internet/)
(www.wired.it/internet/web/2017/05/19/quanto-porno-si-trova-online/)
A film that goes further, that goes beyond the many productions revolving around the porn industry, that highlights one phenomenon while denouncing another.
A grotesque and dramatic film, the psychoanalytic journey of a childhood full of mistakes and regrets, lived with a cumbersome father to forget but also to recover. A sour comedy with a cloyingly sweet aftertaste with a profound and genuine need: to tell a story that now belongs to the past, to something that certainly provokes annoyance but leads to unsuspectedly existential places of reflection.
PORNOGRAPHY IS NOTHING BUT FLESH IN SOLITUDE
20-Aug-2023 by Beatrice