My Mistress

From the cover and trailer I was expecting a lot more, but the movie fell short. There's very little BDSM shown, most of it is implied, there's next to no story and the movie isn't very believable.

Charlie who is sixteen, is going through a rough patch. He's angry and hurting. He doesn't want to feel his pain. So he fixates on a woman who seems to be a Dominatrix. Maggie is having a rough go at life and needs to control something. So she leans into her job as a Mistress.

The film is easily on the lower end of movies. Could be considered a C movie. The filming is horrible, with the camera that shakes and the odd angles. It honestly feels like something a student decided to make. But I was hoping where it lacked in quality it would make up in some R rated BDSM content. It does not. There are very few scenes of Maggie being a Domintrix. There's no sex scenes at all, other then one that is about to happen, showing a little nudity and then they cut the scene.

Harrison Gilbertson who played Charlie did a great job. He was cute with a little bit of bad boy and you wanted to see him get dominated. But Emmamuelle Beart who plays Maggie was the wrong actress. First off her appearance, she looks like someone who's had a rough life, who has been a hooker for many years. And she did not have the presence of a hardened Mistress. She came off as someone you could push around with ease. She felt like a broken person. Not a strong person.

The plot makes no sense. If someone broke into your house, the home you conduct paid sexual activity, you would not invite them to come back, and work for you. Multiple times Charlie stalks Maggie and he breaks into her home. And yet she is perfectly fine with it? Who wrote this? So much of the storyline makes no sense. And it would have been fine to have a bad story if it would of made up with the sexual content. But it doesn't. Instead it barely shows anything.

The only enjoyable part of the film is the slow relationship that builds between Maggie and Charlie. And surprisingly the ending is half decent.

Stephen Lance wrote the story and adapted it for the screen with Gerard Lee and then directed it. It is an Australian film and is the debut for Lance and as such it is rather impressive.

The subject matter of BDSM seems to be growing in popularity, certainly in book and subsequently in films. But what Lance manages to do with this microanalytic form of exploring the extremes of human emotions through the parameters of physical poles of pleasure versus pain works much better than most. Perhaps that is due to the fact that he relies less on in your face on the screen acting out of the whips and chains and torture and agony that always seem so false when attempting to make a story and instead concentrates on why these extremes of acting out represent needs and psychological holds in need of patching. It also helps immensely that he elected to cast the devastatingly beautiful and gifted actress Emmanuelle Béart in the pivotal role of the Dominatrix. She is credible. The story is as follows: It's a long hot summer for Charlie Boyd (Harrison Gilbertson). He's sixteen, his hormones are raging and he's just found out his mother (Rachel Blake) is having an affair with his father's (Hugh Parker) best friend. One thing takes his mind off his problems, the mysterious woman Maggie (Emmanuelle Béart) down the street who has visitors day and night, and has just advertised for a gardener. But she is forgotten when a tragic family event tumbles Charlie into a world of pain, a pain so intense Charlie thinks no-one can help him. He's wrong. Someone can. Maggie, the beautiful French stranger. She's a professional, and she specialises in pain. Giving it, exploring it, sharing it, all for money. So Charlie falls in love, and despite herself so does she, drawn to this troubled boy who takes all the pain she can give and uses it to heal himself. And as Charlie heals, he turns that healing back onto her, his Mistress.

A talented Aussie cast adds a flavor to the film and as far as stories that address BDSM, this is one of the more successful ones. Grady Harp, May 15

The story, actors, music and edition of this film was really good

It was strong enough to make me feel like I'm the teenage boy in this film and this is my story!

In this Australian coming-of-age film, 16-year-old Charlie Boyd (Harrison Gilbertson - Need for Speed) happens on a family tragedy which profoundly affects his relationship with his mother. Unable to relate to her and appearing to be a bit of a loner with few friends, Charlie finds himself curiously drawn to a new woman in town (Emmamuelle Beart - 8 Women) whose beauty captivates him ... although it also appears to capture the attention of several men as she has men entering and leaving her home at all hours of the day and night.

After breaking onto her grounds one afternoon, Charlie discovers Maggie (Beart) with a male client in a rather compromising situation. Charlie learns that Maggie is a dominatrix (for the right price) and he longs to be near her so much he begs her to hire him as her garden/pool boy ... which she reluctantly agrees to do.

The pairing of the two characters in this film is oddly uncomfortable as there is a stigma stateside involving sexual relations (of any kind) with anybody below the age of consent. As Australia's age of consent is 16, this is a societal difference some won't accept but it does make a difference when viewing the movie.

Beart is a strikingly beautiful woman and she is rather believable here as a secretive woman who is as fragile as she is strong. Her wounded soul is believable and I understood her character's frustration, anger and misery. Gilbertson is fine here although he doesn't have to do quite as much as Beart. He portrays a quiet, seething anger rather convincingly and his seeming inability to fully grasp the film's content might be intentional ... as he is still so young himself.

The film is very tame ... one shouldn't be worried about anything that may or may not be shown on screen. The two need what is inside the other person ... so there is no bared flesh in this BDSM film like Fifty Shades of Grey (it has even fewer risqué sequences than R100).

My Mistress has a decent story about two people at its center, it just isn't overly well-developed. I'd have liked a little more of these two emotionally bonding ... I felt like I/it needed more.

THE OUTLINE IS OLD, WELL-KNOWN AND... beloved. The eternal dipole. Male and female, the two initial poles, and among them a potential difference that creates the necessary energetic environment for everything to be born. The ancient game that nobody knows when it started but it is certain that it will never finish. Power play, submission, pleasure. A continuous flow of sexual energy, bridges built and crushed with a nod, a breath, a word, a moment of denial or a decision to throw anyone into the arms of Infinity ... with any costs, with any consequences. Cinema has always loved these schemes, these games, especially between the mentors and the schoolgirls, the gripping milfs and the coward, puzzled, 'enchanting' adolescent, the 'next door' teenagers... And the truth is that these movies, as simplistic or ' primitive ' are - as no one seeks psychological depths in the analyses of characters, nor complex internal routes- have always been watched with pleasure. And sometimes even with awe! Beyond any structural failures, the movie has its virtues. The main, to me at last, is that the aim is not to convict the somatic or sexual pleasures. The film leaves a light aroma despite its rather dramatic background. And if it's worth to be watched is because of this exact feeling that leaves at the end. If someone expects more in another, more ... kinky area ... well he should search for other movies, made by much more sophisticated filmmakers that were based on literary masterpieces and filmed in seasons where sex had conquered much greater levels of exculpation... socially and philosophically.