Destricted

Challenging and controversial are two words that could be used to describe this film, so are pretentious rubbish. I had the same reaction to this film as I did to Battle for Heaven last year, "What am I doing here?" It was another error of judgement that came from reading, and believing, the accompanying blurb in the programme. I was expecting something a bit different just because of the names of the filmmakers attached to the project: Matthew (Cremaster) Barney, Marco Brambilla and Larry (Kids) Clark. What I didn't realise was it was art masquerading as porn, or porn masquerading as art. The film was made up of five different pieces by five different directors looking at sex. Barney's piece was a long slow study of a well-endowed man, with some sort of vegetable matter stuck up his backside, having sex with the drive-shaft of a monster truck. Auto-eroticism on a grand scale. It was long, the film that is, with a pulsating soundtrack, but no other redeeming qualities.


Marco Brambilla's contribution was much shorter and an amazing piece of editing, but the editing together of hundreds of clips from porn films into a dazzling montage of movement, but with no real substance or meaning.

Larry Clark took the documentary route working with young people again. His idea was simple: offer young male porn fans the opportunity to actually meet a porn star and realise their fantasies. All the hopefuls were interviewed and introduced to a selection of industry ladies, whom they got to interview and probe in a sort of bizarre Blind Date meets Pop Idol. The "winner" then got to have his way with the woman, while they were videoed.

The last two films were of people masturbating. The first, called Death Valley, was a static shot of a man masturbating in the middle of Death Valley, while the second was of two separate people, a boy and a girl, probably teens, involved in some serious "self love" in their own darkened bedrooms.

Why a film of this type is shown at a highly-respected festival like Edinburgh, is beyond me. Last year there was Battle for Heaven, which in comparison was a lyrical tale, and I thought it was one of the worse films I'd seen, but that has now been superseded.

Destricted is not erotic, it is not art, is not even really a movie (as far as I am concerned), but a load of mental and physical masturbation. If you want to watch that sort of stuff, buy some proper porn and watch it at home and save your money for a proper film with some redeeming qualities.

Thursday August 17 21:40 and
Saturday August 19 22:00
Cineworld