03 Oct Private Gold 93: The Sexual Adventures of Little Red (2007 Video)

Ladies Fair Orient, Rosy Blooms Appear

A couple years ago, I criticised this team. Today I applaud them.

I am studying “folding,” various techniques for putting the viewer into the narrative. We have good science that indicates mirror neurons work intensely with porn and food movies. That means when you watch, you enter in a profound way. That matters when you have real narrative, so if you wonder about the future of cinema, you have to wonder how porn is going to find narrative.

Michael Ninn was our hope for so-called art porn, and he did something that really impressed me: “Catherine” which leveraged both Tarkovsky and Jarman. The porn bits were sorta dumb, but the cinema was real cinema.

Ninn then passed the torch to Moire Candy — the people behind this — and I thought they let us down. This would have been their next project. (It is hard to tell in the porn world.)

It is very promising.

It is a retelling of the Red Riding Hood story. This is a VERY cool idea. The opening credits have the names of the women “actresses” interwoven with this:

From this short story we discern What all young people ought to learn

Ladies fair orient rosy blooms appear They are beauties in the fragrant spring air!

Sad do they listen to all sorts of tongues Like some enchanting syren’s song

So many of them has the wolf devour’d The wolf, I say for wolves with powers

Of every sorts, and every characters Some of them mild and gentle humored Tamed, familiar, full of compliance

With language wondrous sweet Following young ladies as they walk the street

Ev’n to their very houses and bedside There, in their true design they artful hide

Yet, these simpering wolves who do not see All beauties, dangerous in fact to be

which is a retranslation of Charles Perrault’s 250 year old poem about the moral of the fairy tale. The retranslation subtly reorients the danger from the wolf to the danger of sex in woman. That subtlety matters enough to show.

Here is the end of the original:

Follow young ladies as they walk the street, Ev’n to their very houses, nay, bedside, And, artful, tho’ their true designs they hide; Yet ah! these simpering Wolves! Who does not see Most dangerous of Wolves indeed they be?

Cool, huh?

The story, is of Red (who does not have red hair) — a new “runner,” a mule delivering some sort of package for the fairy godmother, a sort of mafia godfather.

The narrative structure is based on “Run Lola Run.” She goes to deliver the package and meets death, returning to the beginning of the story, each time losing a petal from a flower tattoo. But, like “Groundhog Day,” each time she carries the memory of past tries. But so does the wolf, who himself — we learn late in the story — has a similar tattoo indicating the number of lives remaining.

As her groundhog days progress, the story morphs from the wolf as the threat, to her as the threat. She earns her wisdom by maturing sexually. This part is to put it mildly, blunt. But the main narrative structure is very interesting, and actually apt for a porn movie. There are sets and costumes that actually work.

The porn segments are still dumb, so dumb it hurts. It is Czech, meaning that the women pretend to never have had body hair, have essentially no body fat and affect a sort of innocence. Still, this is worth watching not because of what it is, but for what it promises.

Moire knows how to put shots together, and has an eye for locations. The two main actors aren’t horrible, but they are dubbed.

This could work, with some practice. These guys, Louis and Max, could actually do something worthwhile.

Posted in 2009

Ted’s Evaluation — 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

IMDB