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watching-pictures-move · 2 years

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Put On Your Raincoats | Dream Lovers (Christy, 1980)

I’ve seen a couple of Kim Christy’s movies now, and what’s mostly stood out to me is their fluidity. For the most part it’s been in terms of the sexual content featured. In movies like Squalor Motel, True Crimes of Passion and Divine Atrocities, you get relatively vanilla scenes alongside more fetishistic scenes, sliding between the two almost seamlessly. It’s additionally worth noting that the latter was presented without the mean-spirited charge that it often depicted with in this era, where from my experience a lot of the BDSM content was relegated to roughies. Christy’s films are also of interest for having both cis and trans performers, and the movies I’ve seen have mostly lacked the demeaning presentation that pornography featuring trans performers often have. (I do see a lot of Christy’s movies have a certain slur in the title, so I don’t know if the ones I watched are the exceptions.) To be honest, vintage trans pornography is a blind spot for me, and I’d love to learn about Christy as a filmmaker (both artistically and in the context of the industry), although there doesn’t seem to be much information available. I’ve read an interview in The Advocate and a blog post, which don’t seem to entirely line up or offer a comprehensive picture. I can only hope the Rialto Report manages to do an interview some day, or we get some snazzy, featurette-laden releases from the likes of Vinegar Syndrome.

There is some of that fluidity here, but it’s less in the sexual content (which I’d say is pretty vanilla, aside from a few interesting accents to certain scenes) than in the overall atmosphere. As you can tell from the title, there is a certain dreamlike quality to the film, established early on from the first scene, which features Sulka masturbating in bed and then going down on the strange, masked man she finds in her bathroom, only for it to turn out to be a dream. Or was it? Sulka heads down to the club she owns, where couplings blend into other couplings, and eventually converge into a group sex scene. The aggressive cross-cutting breaks down the barriers between the scenes. Props and images recur, bringing the movie’s reality into question. Photonegative effects and superimpositions lend them a psychedelic charge. And the atmospheric electronic soundtrack, which invites comparisons with Tim Krog’s score for The Boogeyman, drapes the proceedings in an inviting mood.

There’s a lot that I liked about this, but I don’t know if the movie gave me enough to chew on. There’s very little in terms of plot or characterization. Sulka I found an interesting presence in Divine Atrocities, where the dominatrix archetype she played gave her enough of a character to make an impact, while the role she plays here isn’t well defined enough to give her much to work with. Yes, she’s the club owner, but that doesn’t translate to a particularly authoritative or assured character. Squalor Motel had a sense of camp and True Crimes of Passion had a private detective framing device, both of which gave a bit more narrative meat to hang their sex scenes on. In their absence, I’m not sure Christy’s aesthetic execution was tight enough to hold my attention at feature length, although I did appreciate that like Squalor Motel, this tries to tie its sense of erotic charge to the setting, even if it does it less surely.

Anyway, the movie is far from an unpleasant sit, and there’s definitely stuff to like here, I just wish there was more. If you’re going to dive into the work of Kim Christy, don’t go with this first.

#film #movie review #put on your raincoats #dream lovers #kim christy

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haveyouseenthisseries-poll · 4 months

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