Flesh

In a lot of ways this film defines the essence of everything I love about cinema, in terms of capturing those strange, elusive moments of unguarded truth. In other ways, it is undeniably an amateurish, unfocused result of junkies self-indulgently fooling around with a camera. Ultimately it comes out somewhere between pure brilliance and unwatchability (thankfully much more so the former than the latter). Part of me wants to reward it solely for it's absolute innovativeness and moments of pure sublimity, but at the same time I can't completely ignore the occasionally downright awful "acting" and overtly bad production values. At first the editing seems overwhelmingly sloppy and needlessly distracting (or maybe just wrongheadedly "innovative"), but after a while I got used to it, which is, in the end, the true sign of whether a film succeeds on it's own terms or not. I guess that answer basically sums up my all-around feelings for the film. That is, despite it's in-ignorable flaws, on a whole it does work very well. And, if nothing else, a film like this really shows how false and contrived the faux-documentary, shaky-cam style can sometimes be when it so obviously applied purely for effect (such as in films like the otherwise admirable Roger Dodger). Here the aesthetics are plainly derived from the necessities of the filming situation, and are not just used arbitrarily to make it look "cool".

Flesh is the first film of a trilogy by Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol, and is perhaps the first attempt to create an icon of desire out of a male leading role. Although the film is focused on an uncomplicated character development of Joe (Joe Dallesandro), a gentle and subtly unhappy hustler, it depicts him as a passive and ambivalent object, who, in spite of a semi-evident sense of self-control, is possessed, shaped, and evaluated entirely by others. Joe is a young and somewhat naive Adonis who exudes comfort and beauty in his independence, but he works the streets to support his lesbian wife and her girlfriend. He is restlessly bored by an artist/customer's speeches on Greek athletic sculpture and 'body worship', but he sells his nudity anyway. He regards the increasing advances of his homosexual friend with ambivalence, but lets them happen nonetheless. This passivity dominates the film and succeeds in creating a visceral element to Dallesandro's appeal: not only is he desired, he is had.

Perhaps the film's most interesting element is the balance of its obviously experimental nature with its palpable directness. The snappy editing and fragmented dialogue make it fresh and 'real', yet it manages not to rely on the clichéd abstractness of art-films. It is rough, and indeed a weaker effort than Trash or Heat, but nonetheless presents a collection of perfectly plausible characters in a light of almost absolute neutrality.

The opening static shot of Joe sleeping, for a full 4 minuets was very reminiscent of Earlier work done by Morrissey's Quasi-partner, Warhol on the movie Sleep, which is a static shot of some guy sleeping for 6 hours. But Unlike Warhol's work, Paul Morrissey put the narrative into the Warhol aesthetic principals,by giving the actors more substance to each scene, and then moving around the camera, and following the actors actions more closely with a omnipresent eye that doesn't inhibit the actors in sometimes highly improvised situations. (unlike in Warhol's work actors/actresses were aware of the camera at all times and didn't allow them to lose themselves in the moment on screen).Yes there is allot of Improvisation in this film which is what gives it the feeling of watching something that is real. The movie was not scripted, before every scene Paul Morrissey told each actor what he wanted from each scene and the actors were left to their own devices improvising dialogue and advancing the narrative. Choosing the subject of Hustling for a living, selling your self for money, and pairing it with an actor that knows about the lifestyle is what really gave Joe the opportunity to make the character believable. In fact after the movie was shown around the world, people actually thought Joe was Like that in real life, Just like in TRASH, everyone really thought Joe was a junkie. One good scene has Joe picked up by an older gentleman who wants Joe only to pose for some artwork. Joe tells him he wants to earn 100 bucks, (to pay for his wife's girlfriend's abortion) "one hundred dollars!, you'll have to take off all your clothes for that" the old man tells him. The old man is in fact hiding his homosexuality, Pretending to be an artist. Back at his place He tells Joe to take off his clothes, saying that that is the hardest part for anyone to do when posing for art. But Joe's not shy, He takes off all his clothing and starts posing in various olympiadic poses,. While the old man rants on about the different artworks in contemporary society, the aesthetic of greek statues, philosophizing on the beauty of human skin, and how people are obsessed with it, It's too much for Joe, Joe interrupts him asking him for the dinner he promised him. The aesthete's rationalization is paralleled by Joe's last customer of the day, Louis Waldon playing a guy Joe knows from the gym. He pretends that their sex is for the friendlier motive than the money Joe always requests and that despite their sex, "we're not queers." The pretense to friendship is undermined when the customer shifts from the passive suggestions to brusquely ordering Joe about. The client's delusions show his need for purity in a relationship-such as glimpsed in Joe's scene with the baby, where he is nude on the floor feeding the baby bits of muffin. Only with the baby is Joe shown in a relationship were he is not a commodity. Joe runs into some other hustlers on the street, younger ones who sorta look at Joe with respect, because he's the more experienced Hustler, and they being ones who want to learn more. One of the boys asks him if he's straight Joe say's "Hey nobody's straight. What's straight? It's not a thing of being straight or being not straight. It's just...you just do whatever you have to do", and about the johns, he only says "they only wanna suck your peetta!" In another memorable scene With Geri Miller, Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, and Joe. Morrissey pans from, Candy and Jackie (transvestites in real life) sitting down on a couch reading from an old Hollywood magazine > The trannie's quote stuff from the magazine and then Geri's goes into her dramatic story of her rape, meanwhile Joe (emotionless) listens to it all. Later Geri does a topless dance at Joe's request but he ignores her. The film ends like it begins, but with a difference.Again Joe is Naked on his belly on the bed. Reversing the opening order, the full-length view is followed by the profile close-up. But now Joe is no longer alone. His wife is asleep beside him, but between them lies her new lover, the women's legs ardently intertwined. We see him in the relationship from which he is excluded. Joe's naked solitude is redefined as an alienation within a relationship. The film went on to gross over $2,000,000 dollars, making it a very profitable, considering it was done on a budget of only $1,500. It was banned from England for a while, and in Germany 3,000,000 people saw it making it one of the top movies in Germany in that year. It was the first underground film that was accepted on a wide scale basis, and made Joe a very well known person all over the world.

The title practically says it all, and that's all you'll need to be expecting to enjoy this movie. What you get when you watch this film is tons of the beautiful, masterpiece that is Joe Dallesandro all over the screen. It is a day in the life of his character, a married bisexual prostitute, and how his life ties in with all the people around him and all the people he does business with. It is a very interesting and well done film for how well the actors play it out. They act as if it is just an ordinary day and they don't even know a camera is filming them which makes it seem so real. Joe Dallesandro is another reason why this film works out well.

Now, I'm not saying that the main purpose was to make us want to jump into the screen, pull him out and play with him, but goodness was that boy beautiful, and I certainly wanted to do just that. It might be just for his looks that the reason we care to watch his character's day play out so much is because he's so incredibly gorgeous, but in any matter it still makes us care what happens to the character, which is something any film should try to do. It becomes an interesting tale because of how we see what amazing things he's able to do with his body and how amazing his body looks doing them, such as the Greek pose photoshoot and how him playing with and feeding his child in the nude is still sweet and charming whilst being devilishly mouthwatering.

The movie is not meant to be a landmark among film history. It's a run-of-the-mill film about an average day that is made into an excellent story and an excellent movie overall because of how much we enjoy seeing the actors and actresses take part in it. The dialog keeps your attention, the story keeps your attention and Joe Dallesandro's existence keeps your utmost attention. I suggest you see it in the right sense and you'll be able to have fun with it and enjoy it.

I guess only a selected number of audience members really had any interest in watching how a male hustler in New York operates but I'd be willing to bet that even these brave souls were turned off by the irritating patchwork technique and deliberately muffled sound recording on display here; the fact that these inherent 'defects' were a direct result of the film's low-budget/underground/experimental nature is, I'd say, beside the point. Anyway, for those so inclined, the film features extensive male nudity and Joe Dallesandro, understandably, became an underground – and gay – icon!

The episodic structure showing the day-to-day routine of the hustler protagonist offers a couple of mildly interesting scenes: his meeting with (and eventually posing for) an eccentric elderly artist; the one where Dallesandro expresses his views on his unusual line of work and delineates his particular modus operandi to a couple of prospective 'colleagues' including perhaps the unlikeliest of hustlers – a bespectacled nerd! Perhaps mercifully, the film ran for only 89 minutes against the IMDb's claim that its complete length is 105 (but the latter could well be a mistake)!

I had watched a few other of Warhol's 'movies' and this one is decidedly not as satisfying as the most tolerable example I've run into yet, BAD (1977), and only slightly better than the likes of MY HUSTLER (1965) which were mostly a strain to sit through. The fact that this was only the first part of a trilogy did not augur well but, as the saying goes, you gotta to do what you gotta do and the other two 'chapters' had to follow in quick succession...

Despite my generally negative reaction to it, FLESH is nevertheless still valuable as a 1960s time capsule and as a prototype of the Underground scene of that era, both cinematically and in real life. For the record, an image of Dallesandro from this film adorns the sleeve of The Smiths' self-titled 1984 debut album and transsexual Candy Darling (who appears here rather unremarkably) was immortalized in "Candy Says", the opening track of The Velvet Underground's eponymous 1969 album. Although the latter band is my all-time favorite, and one of the reasons for this is that, through their sheerly unique and ground-breaking music, they described a lifestyle so utterly different from my own, this is truly a case where I'd much rather experience something aurally instead of visually!