September 10, 2010: The Erotic Man
The Toronto International Film Festival is up and running again (not anymore as I write this review, of course). I am seeing four out of the 300 films this year, and the first one is The Erotic Man, written and directed by Jørgen Leth. I was informed that Leth is a master filmmaker from Denmark, having been in the business for more than four decades, but this was the first time I had heard of him. Admittedly, that’s my problem and not his.
The movie is a pseudo-documentary about Leth’s attempt to measure, frame and define the erotic. Produced over the space of about 12 years, Leth travelled around the world in between other filmmaking jobs and ran through casting sessions with dozens of women to choose the ones who would read poetry while being shot against exotic backdrops. We see video footage of some of the casting sessions as well as fully-produced film of some of the finished sequences, along with several scenes with Leth musing about the right way to approach this film. He struggles with the process of finding the answer to this elusive question he has asked – what is erotic?
It would be easy to dismiss this film as exploitation, as indeed one of the audience members yelled during the Q&A with the director following the film. There’s plenty of nudity, with long lingering camera shots, focusing on entire bodies and not just faces. I wouldn’t have personally minded if it was exploitative, but I don’t think it was – Leth painstakingly pointed out during the casting sessions in the film as well as during his answers to the audience that these are all actresses, and the project’s intent and structure are explained up front – we see him telling them that he wants them to sit and read poetry, and nudity will be required, but there’s no sex. What more can a guy do?
I think what Leth is trying to do is get us past the surface-layer traditionally “erotic” trappings and make us think about the people, the relationships, the poetry itself (he wrote some of it), and what one intends to find when searching for eroticism. He pointed out during the Q&A that the process IS the story of this film, that he was originally going to use an actor to portray the man searching for an answer, but concluded that he had to play that role himself. Fellow Danish director Lars von Trier gets a producer credit in the film, for the guidance he gave to Leth during the project as he puzzled through the ways it might be approached.
So is this a good movie, or not? In my opinion, not really. It shows the pursuit of a worthwhile goal, but I don’t think any headway was made in the journey, and in this kind of film you need to either make progress or come up with a good explanation as to why not. I believe Leth thinks he’s figured something out, but I don’t think it comes across. The Erotic Man is unlikely to get a theatrical distribution deal, so I doubt that my readers will need to worry about whether or not to see it.
Over-indulgent mix of documentary and fantasy.
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