"Kissed" finds beauty in the mind of a necrophile. |
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NECROPHILIA is a sure-fire attention-getter, especially when the practitioner is a pretty young woman (most real-life necrophiles are men). Lynne Stopkewich's first feature, "Kissed," sounds, in précis, like the kind of trendily dark excursion into forbidden territory that's guaranteed to generate plenty of "controversy" and press in which the director pretends to be terribly brave and daring, all leading to robust ticket sales. Instead, Stopkewich and co-screenwriter Angus Fraser enter into the mind and heart of their heroine, Sandra, so reverently and convincingly that all of their subject's sensationalism evaporates, and "Kissed" achieves one of art's little miracles -- an unexpected blossoming of human sympathy. "Hands like the Virgin," murmurs a devoutly Catholic handyman when he meets Sandra at the funeral home where she has just landed a job. As played by the swan-necked Molly Parker, with her serene Modigliani oval of a face, Sandra is indeed Madonna-like, the furthest thing from a pervert imaginable. From the quasi-liturgical music on the soundtrack to the blinding white light that infuses Sandra's ecstatic couplings with the corpses of various handsome young men, she's driven less by lust than by a hunger for mystical transcendence. She calls it "crossing over" and recalls having "seen bodies shining like stars" from the "explosive" transition from life into death. "Kissed" traces Sandra's fascination back to a youth when dead sparrows and mice proved much more compelling than pubescent games of spin the bottle. The strange little rituals the child Sandra enacts while burying those tiny corpses (repeating lines like "I lower the body, I lower the body" and "I enter the night" at each stage) are the closest the movie comes to depicting the compulsion and rigidity that drives actual paraphilias. But "Kissed" really isn't concerned with showing us the truth about necrophilia, which, like most such disorders (however dangerous and atavistic they seem to us), seeks to narrow and master the chaos of desire. Sandra isn't shoring up the fragile boundaries of the self; she's purposely tearing them down. When a young man named Matt (Peter Outerbridge) becomes her only confidant and eventually her lover, he's half enchanted and half incensed by her secret life. "Face it, it's all about control," he lectures, but that's more his weakness than hers; he's hypocritically keeping a detailed record of Sandra's movements, and launches a concerted campaign to infiltrate her solitary erotic world. Her poised self-containment only eggs him on. By the time their relationship ripens to a crisis, "Kissed" has so pervasively cast its spell that Matt seems sicker than Sandra, a hopelessly blundering and jealous invader who can't begin to understand the strange purity of her quest. Matt and Sandra, despite the outward trappings of deviance, dance a familiar step, a classic heterosexual dynamic -- she absorbed in the inward unfolding of her desires and he inflamed by that completeness that leaves no room for him. She's the embodied mystery of a female sexuality that hardly seems to be about sex at all. As the two lovers come to their own (not unpredictable) resolution to this dilemma, the results are satisfying, but also troubling in surprising ways. "Kissed" intimates that intense romantic obsessions are all somehow necrophiliac: beautifully, but ruthlessly, lonely; too hooked on perfection and self-obliteration to accommodate the messiness, the emotional needs, of mere humanity. Stopkewich achieves all this with an economy that's never austere. "Kissed" has a lovely autumnal look, the Kool-Aid colors of Sandra's childhood grading smoothly into the somber tones of the mortuary. Blessedly free of Goth trappings, the film looks to be set in a stoutly unfashionable version of the late 1970s, a world of wood paneling and long woolen skirts. Although the screenplay occasionally stoops to cheesy jokes hinging on the embalmers' workaday attitudes toward death, it's mostly a wonder of sensitivity, from the adolescent awkwardness of Sandra and Matt's first intimacy to the film's depiction of the mortuary as a kind of church, staffed with grateful workers perpetually transfixed by their tender adoration of the dead.
It's hard to determine what's more impressive about "Kissed": that
Stopkewich sends audiences out the door feeling understanding for a
sexuality usually regarded with shuddering horror, or that she manages to
plumb such outré territory without a shred of calculated, transgressive
posturing. Both testify to the debut of a powerful new talent. Did "Kissed" make necrophilia more comprehensible or even sympathetic for you? Come to Table Talk to discuss. P R E V I O U S R E V I E W S"Grosse Point Blank" By Stephanie Zacharek (04/11/97) "Chasing Amy" By Charles Taylor (04/11/97) "The Saint" By Charles Taylor (04/04/97) "The Daytrippers" By Robin Dougherty (03/28/97) "The Devil's Own" By Charles Taylor (03/28/97) BROWSE OUR MOVIE ARCHIVES |
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