The Pornographer: A Love Story

I saw this movie at The Avignon film festival in France in June 2004, and since this film was made in 2000 it means that thankfully it hasn't been picked up for any sort of distribution. Talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Anyway, by the time the film ended most of the audience had walked out. The director was on hand to tell us that the film was projecting a little darker than normal, total darkness would have made it more watch able. A word of advice to said director, if a film is at the very least engaging an audience will overlook the technical stuff. The film has nothing to with pornography by the way and to add further insult to injury this rubbish won the award for best American film, there was definitely a fix in there, somebody was paid off because I saw the other features that were in competition and they were quite good by normal standards, by The Pornographers standards they were works of genius. Avignon is a wonderful city, my vacation time there happened to coincide with this film festival, which was the centre of attraction in the local square. I met a lot of filmmakers from France and America all excited to show their films which is why I went along to the Pornographer, I met the director, who had managed to persuade Maggie Gyllenhaal and Irene Jacob to be in it. The lead male, Martin Donovan is so boring to watch that he could develop a cottage industry in torture boredom, if you want to torture somebody, strap them to a chair and make them watch the pornographer over and over, they'll beg you to kill them I swear.

A rare film in that it presumes intelligence and imagination are virtues that one can expect from an audience. A patient, dense, elegant film, it tracks a compelling, odd, coldly romantic (!) character (wonderfully explored by the always-beguiling Martin Donovan) as he circles a curious young actress (the wondrous Irene Jacob in her most mesmerizing performance). It is the manner of the circling that is so peculiar: it is all done through a series of working sessions for a film project that may or may not be real. It is much more than a clever device. It is an oblique and surprising meditation on men and women, in the guise of a spry, stylish 'relationship' film. The interior lives of the characters are beautifully created in a series of tableaux, that seem simple, but are wonderfully imagined and always moving forward.

The touching, smartly playful and clear direction of writer/director Alan Wade give the film a tone that leads inexorably to a truly moving, quiet, uncompromising ending. The last moments of the film are the perfect closure to a film that is quite unusual in it's ambitions and it's subject matter. Martin Donovan, even when completely still, gives the impression of intense, personal thought. So does this film.

I saw "The Pornographer: A Love Story" at the Tribeca Film Festival on May 2, 2004 and, thus, was surprised to learn that it was produced in 2000. Having said that, however, I am not surprised to learn that it has never been distributed. It's not that it's "bad" as in uninteresting or poorly crafted, so much. The problem is more that it proceeds at a snail's pace to...well, nowhere. There is some decent dialoge, attractive actors who engage each other well (for the most part), and a flair for taking a different approach to the production (such as having the characters use the digital video camera that is an important set piece as a practical prop that captures some of the video in the movie). But there's no "there" there, as the saying goes. It might have been much more effective as a 20-30 minute short instead of a roughly 90-minute feature.

Add that to the fact that the title (which the director himself seemed unable or unwilling to explain, since it's got nothing to do with pornography) would probably not draw the average American movie-goer and I would expect this one will never even see the inside of most arthouse theaters. I also haven't seen it in the video store; any chance it can't even get a decent straight-to-video release?