“Secretary” (2002)
“Who says that love needs to be soft and gentle?” Based on Mary Gaitskill’s “Bad Behavior,” “Secretary” seems positively vanilla compared to many of the other films on this list; at the very least, it’s the tamest one starring James Spader. For all its kinks, this film follows the basic romantic formula of two people who have to overcome obstacles to be together. But rather than the standard rom-com equation involving misunderstandings, poorly conceived bets or culture clashes, this Steven Shainberg film centers on the alignment of a young woman and her employer’s respective kinks. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Lee Holloway likes to be punished and humiliated by her boss, Mr. E. Edward Grey (Spader), and he likes being in control, as he escalates from circling her typos in red to spanking her bare skin. Though their interactions begin as largely sexual, Gyllenhaal’s broken, brittle secretary finds emotional solace in the relationship and wonders why they can’t be like this all the time. It’s notable for the idea that its grand romantic gesture involves pee, as well as for being such an impressively feminist film, while its main character chooses to be so submissive. “Secretary” may be familiar territory for Spader after starring in “Crash” and “Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” but Gyllenhaal feels entirely fresh in one of her first major roles. Not coincidentally, this is the last time we’ve found Spader particularly attractive (he’ll always be the hotter dom Mr Grey), but we’ve had a crush on Gyllenhaal ever since. [B+]
“Exit to Eden” (1994)
Most of the time, writing about movies is a great honor and a privilege, but there are rare occasions on which we feel like martyrs. The bullet we took for you this time out stars Dan Aykroyd, Rosie O’Donnell, Dana Delaney and Paul Mercurio in a story that, beggaring belief, is based on an Anne Rampling (aka Anne Rice) novel. But while director Garry Marshall and the producers clearly were intrigued by the idea of a film set on an island where people go to explore their domination/submission fantasies, in their wisdom they also decided that what the fetish romance storyline of the novel needed, was a HI-LARIOUS early-90s plot involving a diamond-smuggling pair of villains who are chased onto the island by a pair of wacky cops, the female one of whom is less thin than the other women on the island! Unbelievable though it may be, O’Donnell is actually the one who comes out of this horribly misjudged sad trombone of a film with the most dignity intact; Aykroyd is non-existent as her partner, Mercurio awkward and stockily beefed up from his svelte “Strictly Ballroom” days and Delaney just horribly, horribly miscast as the dominatrix “Mistress” who rides around on a horse wearing a succession of filmy togas. And spare a thought for poor, unbelievably beautiful Iman, who, on this evidence, should have restricted her acting career to the odd Tia Maria commercial. We watched this pile of crap so you don’t have to—you don’t have to thank us, just Never Forget. [F]
“Immoral Tales” (1974)
The line between explicit arthouse fare and softcore smut has ever been a tricky one to draw, and it’s one that Polish director Walerian Borowyck definitely crossed later in his career, directing, among other films, the fifth installment of the “Emmanuelle” series, which was even released in a hardcore version too. But “Immoral Tales” was only his third full-length feature and his first major success, and amongst its wildly uneven four stories, contains some quite spectacular imagery, albeit all in service of an immensely libidinous agenda. The quartet of unrelated segments starts off with the weakest, a tedious story of a boy seducing his young cousin into giving him a blow job on the beach in time to the rhythm of the tides or some old guff: its super-pretentious dialogue is almost unbearable in subtitle, and pretty much unlistenable dubbed. The second story is of a pious young girl locked in her room as punishment for a transgression, whose religious fervor commingles with sexual arousal courtesy of a very large cucumber. The third strand is the best, featuring Paloma Picasso as Countess Bathory, the real-life Hungarian aristocrat rumored to have bathed in the blood of virgins, while the last details the incestuo-blasphemous shenanigans of Lucrezia Borgia. The film’s curiosity value as the subject of various bans is really the main reason to suffer through its intensely ’70s art/porn aesthetic now, though if anyone’s doing a thesis on the evolution of pubic hair fashions through the ages, the amount of bush on display here makes it pretty much unmissable. [C-]
“The Devils” (1971)
Ken Russell’s still jaw-dropping orgy of blasphemous excess is an absolutely incredible film—shocking, provocative and ridiculously beautiful (Derek Jarman’s set design has plenty to do with that). The film, based on a real 17th Century incident is set in the fortress city of Loudon, where the charismatic priest Grandier (Oliver Reed, maybe in his best-ever performance) has a somewhat loose interpretation of his Holy Orders, especially those concerning women. His virility also exerts a pull on the erotic imaginations of a local sisterhood of nuns, particularly the hunchbacked Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave, in a totally fearless physical performance) who, in a frenzy of sexual repression and jealousy, accuses him of bewitching her. The witchfinder (a berserker Michael Gothard) is called in and it all devolves into a series of torture/rape/orgy scenes (it’s not too clear where one ends and the other begins). There follow sequences in which naked nuns masturbate themselves on parts of an altar-sized crucifix, where a tied-down mother superior has a whitish goo pumped into her mouth from a phallic syringe and who later (depending on which cut you’ve seen) jacks off with the charred femur bone of a heretical priest. But for all its X-ratedness (about a million percent deserved in this case), it’s utterly brilliant as well, with its outrageousness and its flashes of humor belying the steely intelligence that runs underneath it all as a chilling indictment of religious hypocrisy and mob mentality, and a great story about, of all things, personal redemption. [A]
“A Dangerous Method” (2011)
For a director once associated with the grisliest body horror, David Cronenberg has made some remarkably cerebral movies, and his drama about the professional tensions between Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and his mentor Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) is among his most composed. So much so, in fact, it might seem like it doesn’t belong here, until you remember that actually, while it’s mostly talk-talk-talk, almost the sole topic of conversation is sex, and sexual dysfunction, as embodied by Jung’s student/patient Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley). It’s an unusually intellectual take on sexuality, more so even than the chilly intrusiveness of “Crash”, and formally the film is among his most tightly controlled, which is why “A Dangerous Method” divided even Cronenberg diehards who couldn’t work out where lay on the spectrum between starchy costume drama and kinky melodrama. But really it’s just a corseted, closeted and buttoned-up iteration of his recurring fascination with the body/mind duality (witness how Jung is almost repulsed by his own longings), and though it lacks the visceral punch (aside from Knightley’s divisive, gurning performance) of his best work it’s still a fascinating exploration of the desires that society forbids us to admit to, and the ones we forbid ourselves. [B]