curated by Margherita Fontana |reviews by Margherita Fontana
Guilty Pleasures is a space free of boundaries and prejudices that Concorto dedicates to sexuality, understood as a political territory of self-expression and encounter with the other. The selection, which includes works from different genres, seeks to reflect this complexity. In fact, sexuality is already narrated before it is made. Hence the centrality of stories and narrative voices, be they authentic testimonies that weave the plot of the documentary or minds that speak out loud. These multiple narratives, which make up the mosaic of Guilty Pleasures, act as a perturbing device on everyday life, revealing its hidden plots without renouncing the disorientating technique par excellence: irony. We hope that the selected short stories will be able to tell us about sex as a lived experience, as a relationship with one’s own and other people’s corporeality, as a way of expressing thoughts and feelings, in an unconventional way, far from stereotypes.
The selected films
curated by Margherita Fontana
Furrie, Lucie Grannec, 2022, France, 8′
Daniel, Claire van Beek, 2019, New Zealand, 19′
Mamífera (Mammal), Valeria Alonso, 2023, Spain, 8′
Os animais mais fofos e engraçados do mundo (The Cutest and Funniest Animals in the World), Renato Sircilli, 2023, Brasil, 24′
Ur Heinous Habit, Eugene Kolb, 2023, USA, 14′
Blank Narcissus (Passion of the Swamp), Peter Strickland, 2022, UK and Australia, 12′
Reviews by Margherita Fontana
Furrie, Lucie Grannec, 2022, France, 8’
Emerging in the United States in the 1980s, the furry community brings together people, or rather fursonas, who like to identify with anthropomorphic animals. Too often trivialised as a form of sexual perversion, the furry identity is rather a space of freedom of expression in which many outsiders have found a home, moving for decades on the web in chats, forums and dedicated communities. Lucie Grannec’s documentary transforms some of the material found online into a playful and teeming animation that paints a joyful portrait of furry eroticism, gathered around a welcoming and warm community.
Daniel, Claire van Beek, 2019, New Zealand, 19’
A young novice, still too involved in sensory stimulation to commit herself definitively to devotion, is confronted with the emergence of a strong desire for a man. In a film populated by a variety of animals, it is a large lizard, a clear symbol of the biblical serpent, that embodies the emerging, uncontrollable sexuality. Set in the New Zealand countryside, Daniel is a film of silences and glances that becomes a staging of original sin. What we witness is a powerful inner conflict that can only find an irrational and violent solution.
Mamífera (Mammal), Valeria Alonso, 2023, Spain, 8’
Based on her novel Las heroínas también tienen miedo, of which it is more a condensation than a restitution, Valeria Alonso’s short film explores the gender roles of a heterosexual couple expecting their first child. The two are about to have sex in order to induce the birth, when what interrupts them is the future that awaits them: especially for her, the “mammal”, the prospect of being crushed by her femininity, which, for example, turns a hair on her face into an unbearable blemish and condemns her to the (exclusive) care of her unborn child. With a subtle irony that directly questions the audience, Valeria Alonso’s play stages the famous slogan of 1970s feminism, “the personal is political”: what happens in the bedroom is not just a banal quarrel, but a clash of
worldviews.
Os animais mais fofos e engraçados do mundo (The Cutest and Funniest Animals in the World), Renato Sircilli, 2023, Brasil, 24’
Jorge is a seventy-year-old janitor working in a modest hotel, and has a habit of recording the guests’ lovemaking with a microphone. Selling the recordings to Alberto guarantees him a little extra income, but their relationship is more than just an exchange of favours. One evening, seemingly like any other, after an encounter that seems similar to the many that have preceded it, Jorge and Alberto discover that they are more than just lovers through the pleasure of others. Sircilli explores the pleasure of possessing someone else’s life, if only for a moment: it is not only the moans that interest Jorge, but also the banal conversations that arouse morbid curiosity just by being stolen. When Jorge and Alberto are the first to tell the story, by silencing the recorder, perhaps something will change. Os animais mais fofos e engraçados do mundo delicately shows how everyday life has the power to transform sex into intimacy.
Ur Heinous Habit, Eugene Kolb, 2023, USA, 14′
What would you do if you received an email from a blackmailer claiming to have stolen footage of you masturbating and threatening to give it to your work colleagues? This is the question that arose in the mind of the director of this short film when he received this now famous SPAM email. This anecdote is the occasion for a choral reflection on the customs associated with this “heinous habit”, which says so much about the relationship that each of us and society in general has with sex. In the simple and sincere testimonies of the interviewees, “hidden” behind animated silhouettes, masturbation appears as an immemorial way of getting to know oneself, or as a recent discovery full of promise.
Blank Narcissus (Passion of the Swamp), Peter Strickland, 2022, UK and Australia, 12’
How much love can there be in porn, or pornography in love? Peter Strickland’s Blank Narcissus (Passion of the Swamp) dismantles and reassembles eroticism by imagining a commentary by the now elderly former lover of the protagonist of a 1970s underground porn film. Explicitly inspired by the cult film Pink Narcissus by James Bidgood, mistakenly attributed to Kenneth Anger, Strickland’s imagined impossible dialogue disrupts porn’s arousing device. In a fantasy version of the myth of Narcissus, what we are actually witnessing is the slow extinction of a story of love and passion that had the power to transform an ordinary apartment into a set as kitschy as it was imaginative. In a game of disorientation for the spectator, who with each passing minute finds himself more and more immersed in Narcissus’ swamp.
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