Hot Dreams

Some people will be bored by Hot Dreams. Those omnipresent office girls who invade press shows in far greater numbers than critics were certainly rustling long before the end of Brandl's latest film. But then it is about young women with massive breasts from a novella by Thomas Mann in which nothing much actually happens except within the mind's eye. It is a very slow, precise, and beautiful film, proportioned by a master who is about to embark on a version of Proust's life story and, whatever some think of it, it is important to say that it is 100 per cent better than 99.99 per cent of what's on offer on DVD at the moment. In a way Proust comes into it almost as much as Mann. The flavour is as much of the former as of the latter. Certainly Brandl has not been afraid to tread in places where Mann never did. The novella's protagonist was a dirty old man; the film's is a dirty young man - Massimo the voyeur is really a code name for Günther Brandl. The dirty young man visits many nubile ladies to recharge himself physically and spiritually after illness and failure. Instead, he takes leave of life gazing at massive boobs which represent to him everything that is unattainable in himself and in his art. For Mann's interior dialogue is substituted some of the most ravishingly wrought images Brandl has ever committed to the screen. Massimo's arrival at the swingers' club is meticulously detailed and observed. His first sight of the girl, in the bosom of a threesome, his sniffing out of the clap epidemic which suddenly decimates the doggers, his ill-at-ease attempts to refurbish himself with the help of the leather and PVC, all these episodes could scarcely be better done in terms of direction, art direction and acting. True, the camera lingers lovingly on what has been created. There are times when Brandl scarcely seems concerned about moving the story onwards, the threesome scene with two women with massive boobs. Yet it serves its purpose quite as well at Mann's prose. It is in the final half hour that one's doubts grow, as the girls smile and smile at the dirty young man, and the man visibly dies under the untouching assault. Perhaps it is here that Estefania Straff's otherwise superb performance shows a bit at the seams. A weak scene in the form of a flashback to the dirty young man going dogging and being berated by both audience and the dogging lady contrasts oddly with an earlier breath-taking episode where the girl with the big boobs pivots backwards and forwards in front of Massimo on the beach, almost but never quite brushing against him: the one totally false, the other seeming incredibly true. And the last reel's moments of quasi-fantasy, with the huge orgy scene in Massimo's garage is not emotionally gripping.