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Destricted (2006)
Director: Marina Abramovic, Matthew Barney, Marco Brambilla, Larry Clark, Gaspar Noé, Richard Prince, Sam Taylor Wood
Movie review
From Time Out London
Back in the pre-internet world, when the BBFC still watched films with scissors ready, arty celluloid smut regularly allowed a patina of artistic credibility to mask the come-hither of a glimpse of flesh. Given today’s ready availability of sexual imagery, however, the same strictures hardly apply, so this art-meets-porn portmanteau will have to wow us with its own intrinsic creative qualities rather than just shock or arousal value.Some of the artists simply do what they do, with Taylor-Wood’s ‘Death Valley’ depicting an extended act of masculine onanism in line with her video portraiture, while ‘Cremaster’ maestro Barney’s ‘Hoist’ mounts another dreamlike tableau, involving lubricated humping of a large piece of industrial machinery. Much less characterful are the segments simply re-presenting porno imagery, though Brambilla’s sex-scene montage ‘Sync’ is zippier than Prince’s tedious, refracted ’70s-style shagfest ‘House Call’. Performance artist Abramovic adds a welcome note of whimsicality with the (made-up?) folk rituals revealed in ‘Balkan Erotic Epic’, as opposed to Noé’s po-faced pretensions in ‘We Fuck Alone’, where a strobe-lit encounter with an inflatable friend lasts a brain-numbing 25 minutes, even though the title gets the key conceit across in about two-and-a-half seconds.
Thank heavens for Larry Clark! His contribution, ‘Impaled’, engages with the remit, presenting a Californian teen with the chance to fuck a porn-star on camera as a way of investigating how hardcore’s erotic routine has colonised America’s imagination. Witty, messily human, slyly insightful, it’s the undoubted highlight of this mixed bag, and will surely be the most-watched chapter on the forthcoming DVD.
Author: Trevor Johnston
Time Out London Issue 1882: September 13-20 2006
Cast & crew
Director: Marina Abramovic, Matthew Barney, Marco Brambilla, Larry Clark, Gaspar Noé, Richard Prince, Sam Taylor Wood
Producer: Mel Agace, Neville Wakefield
Genre(s): Drama
Rated: 18
Duration: 116 mins
UK Release: Sep 15 2006
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