Erosion

In Los Angeles, Irene (Charis Michelsen) works at an advertising agency and lives a boring, loveless and sexually unsatisfying marriage with her husband Carl (Lee Holmes). When she meets the mysterious stranger Gabe (Emmanuel Xuereb), they have an erotic love affair breaking into houses of strangers and stealing their lives for a moment. Both are trying to escape from their pasts with a game that pushes them to the limit of their relationship. But reality is there and can not be forgotten.

"Erosion" is a dramatic "unerotic"-thriller about infidelity of a sexually unsatisfied woman with a promising beginning but a boring development and conclusion. One meaning of erosion is "a gradual decline of something"; in this case, of the morality of the lead character Irene. The plot keeps sexual tension but goes nowhere with the non- explicit game of the lovers. The director Ann Lu is not bold enough and in the end, "Erosion" is neither a drama or romance nor an erotic thriller. My vote is five.

Title (Brazil): "Desejo Selvagem" ("Wild Desire")

Once upon a time a film would tell you a story. If something in the story was extremely sordid, bloody or harrowing the director would miss this part out whilst at the same time allowing you to work out what was happening or had happened through sound or consequence or symbolism. This allowed a far wider audience to see films with really quite important messages.

Here we have the opposite method. Put together the saddest, most painful or just dull aspects of a film that would once have been tastefully left out, and challenge the audience to start trying to imagine the story. We find we can do it that way, being the imaginative creatures we are and having done the work we're pretty much told anyway gradually, but I for one found I didn't really want to. This film made me think... It made me think I'd rather be sat in front of Lethal Weapon. Now that is not good.

I'm not really into artsy films with disjointed stories and long symbolic passages I'm supposed to mull over. The description on the DVD package made it sound like it was going to be much more exciting and sexy than it was. I thought the character progression for the woman was too abrupt. It was just too much of a string of individual scenes for me.

For some reason, as they were breaking into the costume shop the screen turned black and I thought my DVD player had stopped but the time counter was still moving. I fast-forwarded through more black, all of a sudden color bars flashed on and the scene began again but a few seconds back from where it was when it went black. Looked like a bad editing job. Yet another disappointing rental for me.

I recently rented Erosion from my neighborhood Hollywood Video and watched it over the weekend. It's an interesting independent film...very anti-Hollywood in terms of its storytelling style. I was originally attracted to the film by its suggestion of eroticism, but it's not until I watch the film when I realized the sexual encounters are not supposed to be for pleasure but more for pain. They are more about the psychological thrill of the moment, the fear to be caught, the voyeur that may be watching. There are not tits and ass in the film, yet it's the audience's own imagination that makes the film so provocative. We are, in a way, their partners in crime. I really enjoyed Erosion and recommend it to anyone whose imagination is not limited by the images they see and the sound they hear...

I saw this film and was blown away at how truthful the love scenes felt. The acting (especially Charis Michelsen) is totally convincing from beginning to end. Give it 5 minutes at the beginning and the payoff is one that you'll never forget.

It's very erotic without being graphic or lewd. It sets up simple situations between the main characters that completely draw you into their world of trysts in other peoples' homes and makes you feel nervous like someone might walk in and catch you in the midst of doing something taboo.

I loved it and hope that Ann Lu continues to make more films like this one.