Drawing a blank
Irina Palm
15, Barbican and key cities
OK, Marianne Faithfull isn’t bad, but neither is she given anything to be good with. Maggie is mostly a lethargic blank. As for the script, it veers between appallingly predictable — ‘I’m just business to you,’ Maggie even says to Miki at one point — and just appalling, full-stop. When her son, Tom, finds out what she has been up to, as he inevitably does, and she says he doesn’t understand, he comes back, shoutingly, with something like, ‘There are many things I don’t understand. I don’t understand black holes. I don’t understand the Beatles...’ At this point, I’m afraid, I laughed, probably out of embarrassment for the actor (Kevin Bishop). But even if his outrage had been believable, the film wants us to be outraged at that outrage. Calm down, dear, your mother is only masturbating anonymous men. I don’t know how the original meeting between director Sam Garbarski and screenwriters Martin Herron and Philippe Blasband went, but imagine that at some point someone probably said, ‘If we throw in a sick kiddie, it’ll make everything OK.’
Mostly, this is a film that asks us to believe in the redemptive and transformative powers of the hard-core sex industry, and Bubbles and I didn’t like it one bit. Go see Hulk. Do.
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William Oliveira
June 12th, 2008 9:10pmIt's really nice read such an ironic article. I live in Brazil and this kind of narrative is indeed unusual in the general press. Hum, I think Deborah Ross got a reader on the third world...
But wait: you were too bloodthirsty with the movie character!