Flesh

The first film in the Paul Morrissey trilogy, Flesh, tells the story of a male hustler Joe who lives with his lesbian wife Geri. Joe also has a son, whom we see Joe feeding a muffin to very early on in the film. Geri, in the opening scenes of the film, forces Joe out onto the streets so that he can obtain money to pay for her girlfriend's abortion. The film details the various deformed, twisted, perverted, and addicted people that he is forced to deal with (and sleep with) on a daily basis. In the end, Joe is left feeling drained, warped, and vulnerable to every perversion, and the audience is forced to confront the provocative nature of what it is truly like to be comfortable and happy in one's own flesh.

This film is a revelation, and I think it's one of the best and most emotionally raw films of the 60s. It has nothing to do with the quality of the film itself, but rather the imagery it summons and the way it presents itself. This is not a good quality film for those who are just looking for a film to watch. This is the sort of film that you need to allow yourself to be emotionally invested in before you make any calls on what it is. To be frank, it's very tough to describe what the film is exactly. It's a very unorthodox film. As a matter of fact, the subject matter of the film, the camera-work, the performances, and the dialogue in this film are all very unorthodox. This film wasn't intended to exactly be viewed as a film, but rather to bring about a world that the audience can witness and get involved with in an emotional sense. I thought that, despite the crap quality, Morrissey was seriously onto something here. As a film, it obviously isn't that good, but as an exploration of sexuality and of emotional disconnection, it's a serious pleasure to watch. It is funny, unusual, sad, and incredibly sweet. It's probably the most erotic film about hustling I have seen, as well as the most tastefully innocent.

I have neglected to highlight what helps the film really come together. That is Joe Dallesandro. This man has a body unlike anything I have ever seen, and a face of completely unpardonable beauty. What makes this film so deeply frightening in a way is his naive and gentle nature, and as a result we don't feel any internal fear from looking at the images but rather a sense of helpless fear. When you watch the film it becomes more and more clear that Joe has lost whatever wisdom and whatever ideas of security he has, and yet he has changed as a man because of it. If anything it has allowed him to revert to a state of abused self-confidence that really make what happens to him over the course of the film a lot more interesting.

Joe Dallesandro is naked throughout about 80% of the film, but this obviously isn't done to titillate or to be shocking or risqué, but rather for the viewer to drop whatever preconceptions they have about seeing the male body and just accept it as part of the character's personal self doubts being put out and left in the open. The viewer no longer feels like a voyeur, and instead feels closer to the subject of the film. This is one of the least brave things that the film does, and yet when it ends it is the one thing that I thought about the most. This film likely has more male nudity in it than any other film ever made, and yet it's impossible to feel dirty or perverted as a result. Instead, we feel rather taken aback by the style and editing of the film(or the lack thereof), which is strictly amateur and impossibly inept. This is how we come into the film, and it is because of Joe Dallesandro that we leave the picture feeling that we didn't just watch what was merely a film made by a bunch of yuppies, nerds, and junkies.

Ultimately, the film is definitely not for everyone. It will be impossible for some folks to accept the fact that the film is as poor quality and as badly made as it is. It will also be impossible for many folks to appreciate the fact that someone as seemingly sweet as Joe Dallesandro is so fearless and so ready and eager to completely put himself into constant vulnerable positions, both emotionally and physically. Flesh is STRICTLY for people who have a desire to be emotionally and visually involved in a film that digs into the darker and more repulsive aspects of the streets of New York, and refuses to place any sort of judgment. Forget that the film is about a miserable man who prefers to use himself endless to further add to the desecration of the lives of the people around him and concentrate on the humorous, horrible, and varied imagery. This film doesn't have much to say, but damn does it leave you feeling raw. Very few films have this much honesty in their imagery, and even fewer of them are nonjudgmental.

Because this flick is the first feature fruit of a long lasting collaboration between Paul Morrissey, Andy Warhol and Joe Dallessandro, it is too much obvious that it was mostly made for having fun among themselves. The script is quite loose, the dialogues are too obviously improvised, one even suspects that there probably is no script at all, just thematic concepts: prostitution, addiction and poverty (which all seem to continue in the following films Trash and Heat).

Joe Dallessandro reveals unashamedly his gorgeous body at any chance, to the hungry eyes of other addicts (not only drug addicts).



Although the whole film seems like amateurish, especially the scene with other hustlers at the park is very intriguing, like a documentary project.

I would not recommend to see this by itself, but watching the trilogy (Flesh, Heat and Trash) altogether will be much enlightening.

Flesh is the first film of a trilogy by Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol, and is perhaps the first attempt to create an icon of desire out of a male leading role. Although the film is focused on an uncomplicated character development of Joe (Joe Dallesandro), a gentle and subtly unhappy hustler, it depicts him as a passive and ambivalent object, who, in spite of a semi-evident sense of self-control, is possessed, shaped, and evaluated entirely by others. Joe is a young and somewhat naive Adonis who exudes comfort and beauty in his independence, but he works the streets to support his lesbian wife and her girlfriend. He is restlessly bored by an artist/customer's speeches on Greek athletic sculpture and 'body worship', but he sells his nudity anyway. He regards the increasing advances of his homosexual friend with ambivalence, but lets them happen nonetheless. This passivity dominates the film and succeeds in creating a visceral element to Dallesandro's appeal: not only is he desired, he is had.

Perhaps the film's most interesting element is the balance of its obviously experimental nature with its palpable directness. The snappy editing and fragmented dialogue make it fresh and 'real', yet it manages not to rely on the clichéd abstractness of art-films. It is rough, and indeed a weaker effort than Trash or Heat, but nonetheless presents a collection of perfectly plausible characters in a light of almost absolute neutrality.

In a lot of ways this film defines the essence of everything I love about cinema, in terms of capturing those strange, elusive moments of unguarded truth. In other ways, it is undeniably an amateurish, unfocused result of junkies self-indulgently fooling around with a camera. Ultimately it comes out somewhere between pure brilliance and unwatchability (thankfully much more so the former than the latter). Part of me wants to reward it solely for it's absolute innovativeness and moments of pure sublimity, but at the same time I can't completely ignore the occasionally downright awful "acting" and overtly bad production values. At first the editing seems overwhelmingly sloppy and needlessly distracting (or maybe just wrongheadedly "innovative"), but after a while I got used to it, which is, in the end, the true sign of whether a film succeeds on it's own terms or not. I guess that answer basically sums up my all-around feelings for the film. That is, despite it's in-ignorable flaws, on a whole it does work very well. And, if nothing else, a film like this really shows how false and contrived the faux-documentary, shaky-cam style can sometimes be when it so obviously applied purely for effect (such as in films like the otherwise admirable Roger Dodger). Here the aesthetics are plainly derived from the necessities of the filming situation, and are not just used arbitrarily to make it look "cool".

I guess only a selected number of audience members really had any interest in watching how a male hustler in New York operates but I'd be willing to bet that even these brave souls were turned off by the irritating patchwork technique and deliberately muffled sound recording on display here; the fact that these inherent 'defects' were a direct result of the film's low-budget/underground/experimental nature is, I'd say, beside the point. Anyway, for those so inclined, the film features extensive male nudity and Joe Dallesandro, understandably, became an underground – and gay – icon!

The episodic structure showing the day-to-day routine of the hustler protagonist offers a couple of mildly interesting scenes: his meeting with (and eventually posing for) an eccentric elderly artist; the one where Dallesandro expresses his views on his unusual line of work and delineates his particular modus operandi to a couple of prospective 'colleagues' including perhaps the unlikeliest of hustlers – a bespectacled nerd! Perhaps mercifully, the film ran for only 89 minutes against the IMDb's claim that its complete length is 105 (but the latter could well be a mistake)!

I had watched a few other of Warhol's 'movies' and this one is decidedly not as satisfying as the most tolerable example I've run into yet, BAD (1977), and only slightly better than the likes of MY HUSTLER (1965) which were mostly a strain to sit through. The fact that this was only the first part of a trilogy did not augur well but, as the saying goes, you gotta to do what you gotta do and the other two 'chapters' had to follow in quick succession...

Despite my generally negative reaction to it, FLESH is nevertheless still valuable as a 1960s time capsule and as a prototype of the Underground scene of that era, both cinematically and in real life. For the record, an image of Dallesandro from this film adorns the sleeve of The Smiths' self-titled 1984 debut album and transsexual Candy Darling (who appears here rather unremarkably) was immortalized in "Candy Says", the opening track of The Velvet Underground's eponymous 1969 album. Although the latter band is my all-time favorite, and one of the reasons for this is that, through their sheerly unique and ground-breaking music, they described a lifestyle so utterly different from my own, this is truly a case where I'd much rather experience something aurally instead of visually!