Mind Over Body
Eros' three-pronged poke leaves a lot to be desired
If porn is all about the fluidy payoff, then erotica is about delayed gratification with maybe even a little bit of frustration. While porn seems to operate best if the brain is switched to "off" and works directly on the groin, erotica has an entirely different formula. In erotica, the brain is "on" and the body rides shotgun.
The disappointing omnibus film Eros features three international directors - Wong Kar Wai, Steven Soderbergh and Michelangelo Antonioni - tackling the subject of desire. Anthology films in general are a tough sell, requiring well-known directors to work in a short-film format that may not necessarily be the most advantageous use of their talents.
Eros is an even more daunting undertaking. Everyone is familiar with the deeply conventionalized in-and-out fundamentals of porn. Boy meets boy/girl. Boy fucks boy/girl. Repeat ad nauseam.
But with erotica so dependent upon mind over body, denied gratification vs. the money shot, things get much more complicated. There is always the chance that the maker will be revealed as either pretentious, for acting like eros doesn't ultimately come down to the fire between the loins, or just goofy, for revealing one's tumescent fixations so awkwardly la Nine 1/2 Weeks or Wild Orchid.
The pretense factor virtually sinks the woefully disappointing entry from Antonioni, master of the '60s international art cinema. "The Dangerous Thread of Things" starts out promisingly, like a waking dream in the tradition of Eyes Wide Shut about a couple's collapse of desire. But the film soon fizzles into scenes of fleshy origami and such bloodcurdling New Age absurdity you may need to rent L'Avventura again to erase the imagery from your mind's eye.
Merriam-Webster's definition of eros includes "a fundamental creative impulse having a sensual element." Eros' one consistent revelation is how all filmmaking - at its heart - is an erotic enterprise founded upon desires translated into imagery, and also dependent upon a cerebral striptease of revelation and concealment.
The implicit eros of filmmaking is certainly on bold display in Wong Kar Wai's prolonged idée fixe "The Hand," about an abstract love affair between a tailor (Chang Chen) and a courtesan (Gong Li) displaced onto clothing. Like Wai's In the Mood for Love, "The Hand" derives significant fetishy thrills from the starched collars and formfitting cheongsams worn by its star, which craft Li into the kind of erotic bauble Josef von Sternberg made of Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus. But his reliance on atmosphere can create a bewitching fog of style-for-style's sake and leave a lingering disappointment by the film's conclusion that little of substance has transpired.
The most oblique of the three, Steven Soderbergh's "Equilibrium," is also the one most about film. It conjures up allusions to Rear Window and film noir with its psychologically labyrinthine story line and obsessive hero, Nick Penrose (Robert Downey Jr.), recounting a sex dream to his distracted psychiatrist (Alan Arkin). Freud called the sex drive one of life's most important motivating forces, and "Equilibrium" is, in essence, a prolonged joke about the distracting, head-swimming power of the libido.
But nothing Soderbergh says about desire in his amusing but fussy circle jerk is as impressive as the film that put him on the indie map, sex, lies, & videotape.
Eros feels almost entirely irrelevant, when each of its directors has already crafted memorable films in which desire and longing are the subflooring of daily life.