KISSED
Somehow manages to be silly and offensive at the same time
Kissed is the film - along with Cronenberg's Crash - that is most frequently invoked as an example of why Canadians never go see Canadian movies (hey, nobody else does either). Maybe it's the right film, but it's the wrong reason. It's not the weird, weird subject matter, it's the fact that most Canadian movies are just no fun at all.
Yes, it's the infamous "necrophiliac chick" movie that I'm sure you've heard all sorts of things about. A young woman, fascinated with death, takes a job at a funeral home and enjoys her work a little too much. (insert "lucky stiff" joke here)
Molly Parker - who's kind of a cutie, and I'll get to that soon enough - is in the lead role, and it's not an easy one. Can this movie avoid being unintentionally hilarious? Can it avoid being simply icky? Well...no. This girl's compulsion to fuck the dead is frustratingly vague - basically, all we get out of it is a bunch of New Age babble about how she's "crossing over", whatever that means. And in failure to understand, how is one expected to react? It's so, so hard not to laugh here, and in the absence of being given a good reason to take things more seriously, one loses the will to put in the effort to restrain oneself.
Parker's job, however, is comparatively easy. In what must have been an unbelievably difficult role, Peter Outerbridge plays her boyfriend - the guy who's actually intrigued by the notion of her necrophilia, and wants some firsthand insight into this all (which, of course, she denies him, leading to...well, just what you imagine).
Outerbridge actually manages to keep a straight face while saying lines like "I have to fuck a corpse!" That alone is pretty impressive.
I dunno, guys. The music's kinda neat (it's got Sarah McLoughlin on the soundtrack, so that oughtta get Criswell's toes a-tappin') (I kid, I kid), it's well shot, and the cast and cinematographer (if not writer/director Lynne Stopkewitch) give it everything they have, but it just kinda...what are we supposed to do with this?
The necrophilia isn't there to titillate, or to produce laughs (which it manages to do anyway) - there seems to be a genuine effort to Say Something here, but at first, all I saw was some chick straddling a dead guy. I hope my dead, bloated carcass gets half that much action. It was only after some thought that I saw the point to this, and when I did, I didn't like it one bit.
The more I think about this movie, the worse it gets. When I first saw it, I thought it wasn't bad, but it was just too silly. Now it's actually begun to offend me, which is no small feat. It's been said that it's never the subject matter that makes a movie offensive - it's the handling of said subject matter. I would agree with that completely. And this movie drops the ball, in a big way. Two big ways, really. First is the casting.
This casting is a twofold slap to any thinking viewer. First, the fact that the lead is a woman. Think about this for a second - just what is she having sex with? Dead bodies. Now, make all the "lucky stiff" and "rigor mortis" jokes you want; none of it has anything to do with erectile function, certainly not as long after death as these bodies are by the time she gets her paws on them. This girl makes it clear that yes, she is fucking these corpses, but this is simply not possible. Why do you never hear about female necrophiliacs? Because they can't get anything out of it, except for a naked straddling, which they can do with pretty much anything. They'd be better off fucking a tree. So, in a liberal nutshell, the lead of this story is cast as a female only because nobody making this film had the guts to give us an honest, genuine necrophiliac - that is, a man.
God help the filmmakers had they decided to cast the lead as a male. The ol' GWAR credo aside ("It's not rape if it's dead!"), this movie would have been crucified for being, basically, a sympathetic - nay, aggrandizing - portrayal of a man who rapes the dead. Instead, what we have here is a safe little movie about a pretty, "special" girl (not a sexual deviant) who does this "crossing-over" thing (whatever you do, don't call it raping the dead - this is a spiritual act of love), as if it's for the corpse and not for her own sexual satisfaction.
Normally, the "they'd never get away with that if s/he was a wo/man" argument is met as whining; but here, I think it's inevitable. Sure, they'd never get away with it if she was a man, but at least then we'd have a premise that made sense. It may have been controversial (I mean REALLY controversial, not the unenthusiastic hems and haws that this movie produced), but it would have been honest.
The casting also fails us by having a pretty lady in the lead. Because pretty women can get away with ANYTHING. Especially in movies. The viewer can too easily go "aaw, she's special", no matter what she?s doing. Would this movie have gotten half the reception it did if it cast a homely woman in the lead, or a fat one? Bzzzt, nosireebob.. Because it would have been easier for audiences (male and female alike) to have seen her necrophilia as a violation that way. It'd be easier to say "Ooh, gross." And the filmmakers are effectively let off the hook - now they don't NEED to create an interesting lead, or do something genuinely intriguing with her, or her motivation. No real effort is needed for us to accept her - after all, if your dead bloated carcass were to be molested, wouldn't you want it to be by somebody as cute as Molly Parker? It's a lot easier for Stopkewitch to make a lovely, beautifully shot love scene That We Must Read On Another Level And Take Seriously between Molly Parker and a corpse than it would be for her to film one with somebody less easy on the eyes.
Now, I know that the movies are loaded with beautiful people, and the movies they're in allow their beautiful characters to get away with everything. But in the specific case of this film, the beauty is central to the copout; it's rape, and it's a rape where the victim can't put up a fight. Without the kicking and screaming, all that's needed to make it look like loving sex is beautiful people and angelic choirs.
The movie isn't giving us this with an ironic, satirical wink. Take the moment when the girl is told about her (fat, ugly, very much male) boss' own necrophilic tendencies. What a horrid thing, we're supposed to accept. And this guy's excuse? "They're just dead flesh," he protests. She sees this as ghastly. So are we meant to. Oh, thanks for the distinction there. Basically, we're given an honest motivation for this man's necrophilia, and given this New Age babble as a motivation for hers, even though it still comes down to her own sexual satisfaction. Doesn't this smell just a little like hypocritical bullshit?
The other thing that really, really bothers me about this movie is the ending. This is a major spoiler, so if you haven't seen the film, consider yourself warned before you swipe below.
Again, at first, it just seemed silly, like the rest of the movie. But think about it for a second. This chick?s boyfriend, deciding that he cannot possibly sexually compete with all these lucky stiffs around him, concludes that her sexual satisfaction is worth more than his life. He thus kills himself.
Think about that. He kills himself (by naked hanging!). Now, he gets no sympathy from me. Any guy who hears the object of his affections tell him that she likes to fuck corpses, and continues to romantically pursue her, deserves whatever he gets. Damn fool's lucky she didn't kill him herself. Now, again, it's not the subject matter that gets to me, it's how it's handled. That he kills himself is actually quite an appropriate conclusion (well, near-conclusion) to their relationship.
But the movie dares to make a happy ending out of this. This is shown as a noble sacrifice, for a worthy cause. This pleases her, despire her initial horror, and it's clearly meant to please the viewer when we see her lay next to his corpse in a gesture of some sick semblance of love. "Aw, isn't that sweet?" we're supposed to say. Doesn't this strike you as supremely fucked up? And in a bad way, not a good way? Did you get for a moment the impression that you were SUPPOSED to be disturbed?
Again, just imagine if the sexes of the cast members were reversed. A woman decides her life is worth less than her lover's orgasm, and kills herself. The male lover, initially horrified, nevertheless fucks the body anyway, and is pleased. Glorious angel choruses play, while the camera lingers softly on the man's face next to his dead lover, in a pose of warmth and lovingness.
That movie would have been the subject of some real goddamn controversy. This, however, was not. What does that tell you?
It might tell you something about the political climate, or about lobbying power, or about what people might or might not accept. You know what it tells me? That the filmmakers didn't have the guts to make a movie that lived up to the controversy its subject matter promised. Or even putting the notion of controversy aside, I would have liked to have seen what would have happened in Kissed had this chick been caught in the act by a family member of the deceased. But then we would have had to have used our brains and questioned the actions of this girl, who we otherwise are supposed to accept without judging.
This movie candy-coats, glosses over, waters down - in other words, everything necessary to get us to accept its subject matter, short of actually doing something compelling with it. It does all the glamorizing it can to get us to accept the horrid, short of making a real case for it. And that, my friends, is offensive.