Silver Shoes

Compared to many other films, the "everyday realness" of the film is the number one thing about it. Second, is the general upbeat nature of the actors/characters.

It has a 'modern film' feel, however the sound (and music during the lunch table scene) is more "bold and the beautiful".

There are three (3) main scenes stretched over 1 hour.

Main criticisms are that because the scenes are stretched out, there's a lot of "filler" - the camera being ultra-zoomed in on nothing. Many times there's a shot that frames the characters perfectly and what's going on, then it slowly zooms into a freckle and then wanders off to a knee and stays there for several seconds. Even so - it's more watchable than most achingly depressing and angry modern films.

My dislike of phony movie "awards" knows no bounds, so the accolade granted "Silver Shoes" by a feminist group raised my hackles. Sure enough, this desultory film, basically short subjects padded out to barely feature length, rests on the creaky foundation of not being porn, and thereby somehow being "quality cinema".

Quite the contrary: writer-director Jennifer Lyon Bell who proudly lectures on cinema in Europe from her base in Amsterdam has been making these amateurish films for a decade, with results far below the quality level of even hack pornographers. Her movies are ersatz-porn, put on a pedestal by folks and like-minded would-be experts who dismiss porn (even its rare quality productions) out of hand and basically try to re-invent the wheel when it comes to portraying eroticism on screen.

Such films, and there are many in not the silver shoes but rather "Silver Spoon" category like Michael Winterbottom's pitiful "9 Songs" or various French junk by Ovidie and Gaspar Noe ("Irreversible" and "Love") or even Lars von Trier's execrable "Nymphomaniac" and "Antichrist".

Back to Ms. Bell -her approach reminds me of the minimalism championed by Chantal Akerman, whose early in career erotic work "Je Tu Il Elles" I liked when shown here 40 years ago. But Jennifer makes the mistake of leaving her germs of ideas stillborn, not fleshed out in the final script or shoot and mere springboards for explicit sex. It's not gonzo but then again it's hardly storyline porn either, emerging as merely "artsy" (fartsy?).

The three segments are all set in a prosaic apartment, rating zero in terms of production values. "Undressed" is built on the premise that "indie" porn star, thick-bushed Liandra Dahl, likes to express and balance the masculine with the feminine side of her personality by wearing men's clothes, specifically underwear. This 1/2-hour saga has all the depth and artistry of a Calvin Klein commercial and I've seen not dozens but literally hundreds of better-made (in every way) and more arousing (by far) lesbian videos from card-carrying Porn labels like Girlfriends Films and Sweetheart Video. Liandra's emphasis on a two-way dildo (which she brought to the production from home) plays more like product placement than artistic content.

Brief middle segment (13 minutes in duration) spotlights Liandra's Chatsworth-based co-star AnnaBelle Lee in a solo masturbation turn. The DVD's more interesting interview footage explains how Lee tapped a Proustian sense memory when she grasped a jacket from the closet of the apartment's owner, inspiring her to cry and carry on in this vignette, which like so much of auteur Bell's work seems intentionally cryptic.

A male of the species is added for the big finale "Mimosa" (a drink imbibed at a hen party plus one brunch hosted by Liandra for her Amsterdam gal pals). He is the untalented Joost Smoss, a grinning nincompoop who possesses a big dick, which in art films as well as REAL porn is a prerequisite for any would-be actor in the 21st Century. (The last porn epic I can recall of any pedigree that starred a guy with a small dick was Oshima's breakthrough "In the Realm of the Senses", some 40 years ago.)

Dreadful semi-improvised dialog has the cheery but empty girls chatting ad nauseum about nothing, ending with Liandra embarrassingly assuming guest Joost is gay, as she wonders out loud why she fails so miserably at attracting beaus of the opposite sex. After her blushing at finding out she jumped to the wrong (and un-p.c.) conclusion about Joost it takes only mere seconds for him not only to forgive her but to hump her. Of course she must leave the room at one point after heavy petting to fetch the safe- sex condom, and the poorly executed woman-on-top XXX scene ends without a money shot -that would be porn! To say it fails in the erotic department is an understatement.

Bell's DVD extras even admit flat out that she had to delete a segment of Joost in one (analogous to Lee's entra'acte turn) masturbating to a photo of Liandra and AnnaBelle, because "it confused audiences". That's a euphemism for half-baked results, a cop-out that applies to the entire feature.