Bird's Eye View 2011 Preview: Orgasm Inc.

Dir: Liz Canner

Orgasm Inc. is a more serious and less salacious film than its title might suggest. It's a personal film from director Liz Canner, who apparently spent nine years working on this project, beginning when a drug company contacted her to ask her to edit together pornographic footage for use in a clinical trial of a cream designed to treat a newly defined condition 'female sexual dysfunction'.

Canner clearly started out pretty simply, documenting what she was doing for Vivus, and talking to various people at the company about the drug and about FSD, but the film expands with its director's horizons, as she begins to ask questions about whether FSD is a medical condition, and what the drug companies motives are for pursuing a treatment for it. Orgasm Inc. becomes, if not a full assault advocacy film, a skeptical exploration of the comodification of disease and cure, especially in the US. Canner isn't Michael Moore, and her film is inquiring rather than hectoring, but no less disturbing for it. Perhaps the most troubling sequence takes place in a private FSD clinic run by Dr Laura Berman, where we are taken through the process by which, day by day, perfectly normal sexual issues are being medicalised, with a bill of $1500 at the end of the day.

There is also a fascinating insight into the way a drug gains FDA approval for use in the US, with Canner's footage of the meeting to decide whether a testosterone patch to treat FSD should be approved providing a genuinely intimate and edifying (and surprisingly heartening) glimpse of this process. If nothing else, Orgasm Inc. raises some important questions about how we classify and treat disease in the 21st century.

It doesn't all work though. While she's not hectoring, Canner's interviews can feel a little lightweight, and you'll want to hear the answers to questions that she apparently doesn't ask. It's also a little scattershot, and though it's just 79 minutes long some sequences feel extraneous,none more so than one that opens the film, then recurs later, in which Canner sets up a camera to film a woman's face as she masturbates to orgasm. There's no real purpose to this scene, it doesn't say anything, and all it did for me was remind me that I should rewatch the video for Romantic Death by The Sun sometime soon. There's also an animated sequence depicting four FSD drugs in a race for FDA approval which seems out of step with the rest of the film; it's silly, and far too on the nose for my liking.

Orgasm Inc. could be much more developed, but as a primer on an important and under recognised issue, it certainly has merit, and is well worth the 79 minutes it will take to watch it.

Bird's Eye View 2011 Preview: Guilty Pleasures

DIR: Julie Moggan

Julie Moggan won a Best Pitch prize for her idea for a documentary exploring the world of Mills and Boon readers. Mills and Boon, in case you have never been in a charity shop, are a seemingly endless line of romance novels, written to a prescribed formula. In Guilty Pleasures, Moggan turns most of her focus on the series' readers, trying to discover how their lives are influenced by the books. She also profiles a writer (a retired doctor named Roger who writes under the name Gill Sanderson) and a cover model (the incredibly flaky Stephen).

Most of the people that Moggan looks at here aren't very appealing. There is Hiroko, whose love of the books has led her to take up ballroom dancing with such passion that her (clearly long suffering) husband sadly notes that they can't discuss having more children because it would interrupt her lessons. British housewife Shirley seems sweet enough, but her husband Phil is almost a living caricature of a chauvanist, and it is he who gets the more screentime (one cringemaking scene has him showing off his tool belt, and almost every sentence he says seems like a bad joke from a politically incorrect 70's sitcom). In India, Shumita is a middle aged woman whose husband left her some years ago for a younger model, but seems now to want to be back in her life (we meet him briefly, he's a knob). Shumita seems to have bought into the idea of lifelong romance through her reading, even though life is suggesting that she shouldn't.

It's interesting, though, that perhaps the most unrealistic ideas of love are held not by the readers but by the man on the covers of their books. Stephen comes out with an endless stream of new age bollocks, much of it revolving around the idea of his 'true flame'. He should, one suspects, be writing Mills and Boon rather than exposing his abs on the jackets. Roger is probably the most normal person in the film, there's an air of sadness and loneliness about him, but he seems to push that to the background, and for the most part is pretty happy overall.

Even though most of Moggan's subjects are rather unlikeable or annoying, there are interesting stories to be told here. Unfortunately by following so many people Moggan gets only a loose grip on her narrative threads, and ends up with little real insight. There are moments that intrigue; Hiroko's husband saying that the books give her something he can't; a couple of unpleasant meetings between Shumita and her estranged husband Sanjay; Phil's general attitude to women, but Moggan fails to make the most of them, she never seems to be there with the well placed, probing, question that would open these people and their lives up. Too often she's content with a trite image (Shirley and Phil in bed, her reading a Mills and Boon, he a true crime book called Unnatural Deaths Volume 2) or leaves something potentially intriguing (Roger writing observations of everyday people, which he says give him story ideas) unexplored.

That's not to say there aren't fascinating moments here. I don't like Hiroko, but you can't deny that she's intriguing. More than the other readers she seems desperate to engage in this dreamworld, she doesn't seem to like her husband very much. For his part he seems to love her, in one very sweet scene he practices the dance steps she wants him to learn for a competition while standing alone waiting for a train - though here, as in several other moments, there could be definite questions about how real the moment is. Hiroko's princess fantasy seems to begin to come true towards the end of the film, though how you'll feel about that is very debatable.

Roger is also interesting; a lonely man, posing as a woman and writing about love. I wish Moggan had dug into his story much more deeply, because I suspect there's a whole film there.

Ultimately, Guilty Pleasures doesn't really tie itself together very well, Mills and Boon barely figures in some of these stories (especially that of Shirley and Phil), and we don't really learn much about the brand itself. There are flashes of the better film that this might have been, but overall this award winning pitch hasn't lived up to the promise it had.

Bird's Eye View Film Festival 2011 Preview: Part 1

For the last seven years the Birds Eye View Film Festival has showcased the work of female directors (still a shocking minority in the industry). I've attended screenings at the festival several times before, but this year, for the first time, I'll be reporting on it in full.

Over the next couple of posts I'll be picking out some of the films and events that most interest me from the festival programme. In this first part I'll look at the main feature programme, the second part (tomorrow or Thursday) will cover documentaries and special events.
Summaries are taken from the BEV programme.


Grown Up Movie Star

Sexual awakening - and reawakening - takes an explosive turn, with a brilliant, fiery, Sundance-winning central performance by Tatiana Maslany

Given the dominance of English language cinema it's a surprise that we don't see more Canadian films in our cinemas. The available stills suggest that award winning writer Adriana Maggs (making her directorial debut) has a sharp eye as well as a sharp pen and the fact that lead Tatiana Maslany won a special jury for best newcomer at Sundance last year bodes well for at least one standout performance.


The Imperialists Are Still Alive!

Part comedy, part alluring commentary on post-9/11 America, this razor-sharp drama follows an Arabic artist in New York

An international project, with French actress Elodie Bouchez starring in an American made film by a British writer/director. The charismatic Bouchez is always worth watching, and the film's exploration of post 9/11 politics through a main character who is heavily westernised woman of middle eastern origins promises to be interesting, providing it can avoid being heavy handed.


In a Better World

2011 Golden Globe-winner and Oscar nominee: a breathtaking exploration of cycles of violence in modern society from Susanne Bier

Susanne Bier returns to her native Denmark, following the indifferently received Things We Lost in the Fire. She's telling the stories of two families, linked by what is described as a dangerous friendship between their sons. Personally I want to see this for the cast, I became an instant fan of lead actress Trine Dyrholm after seeing her in prison drama In Your Hands, and have been wanting to see more of her work since. Similarly, Michael Persbrandt impressed me in 2009's Everlasting Moments. Combine that with the reception so far, and the quality of what's coming out of Denmark lately and this would seem to be appointment viewing, as well as a solid bet for the Foreign Film Oscar.


Meek's Cutoff

A starkly modern drama of faith and survival set on the 19th century pioneer trails across the American midwest, starring Michelle Williams

I saw this startlingly good third film by Kelly Reichardt at the London Film Festival. It's one of the best films I saw last year; stunning to look at, brilliantly acted, tense and haunting. This will be a screening well worth attending, both for the film itself and, I'm sure, for the following Q and A with the ever underrated Shirley Henderson, and hopefully Reichardt as well.


Near Dark

A sexy, bloody, seminal vampire flick by Academy Award-winner Kathryn Bigelow

A relatively rare chance, as part of the festival's Bloody Women sidebar (of which more in the second part of this preview), to see Kathryn Bigelow's modern vampire western on the big screen. Even better, it's showing at the Prince Charles cinema, which is a brilliant place to see cult movies like this.


Tiny Furniture

Lena Dunham's brilliantly offbeat quarterlife crisis comedy took America by storm

I have a feeling that I'll either fall head over heels for 24 year old Lena Dunham's first film or find it completely insufferable. Tiny Furniture was written and shot, in Dunham's home, with her family and friends co-starring, all in the space of three months; a good example of the new breed of super indie cinema. If she handles it well then this story of a 22 year old post grad trying to figure out what to do with her life should be identifiable and affecting, handled poorly it could easily be twee, shallow and annoying. I hope she pulls it off.

Vision: From the Life of Hildegaard von Bingen

Inspiring portrait of the 12th century Benedictine nun who fought to have her own convent and preach the gospel

From this year's Filmmaker Focus series, on German director Margarethe von Trotta, whose films I really have been meaning to explore. There's another reason I want to see Vision though; As someone who isn't religious, I'm fascinated by the devotion of people like nuns and monks, it's often been an intriguing subject for films, both fiction and documentary. This also sounds like a story well worth telling in and of itself, certainly it's a piece of history that I knew nothing about.