memory

Erotic Man (Det Erotiske Menneske) (Director: Jørgen Leth): This some­what exper­i­mental and extremely per­sonal film raised so many issues for me to think about that I’m not sure my rating will align much with that of other reviewers. I don’t mind at all. Leth, who has been making films for more than 40 years, has made per­haps his most honest and per­sonal one yet. An exam­in­a­tion of the erotic, it’s more of a per­sonal memoir, a record of an attempt to recreate (or create) memories or fantasies (romantic/sexual) from years of exper­i­ences all over the world. Leth seems to have an affinity for the exotic, having traveled extens­ively in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia. Since 1991, he’s lived in Haiti, and this film seems to have emerged from a long-term love affair he exper­i­enced there. In fact, this film and his memoir The Imperfect Man have caused con­tro­versy in his native Denmark because in them he details his rela­tion­ship with Dorothie, the 17-year-old daughter of his cook. It’s very clear from the film that his five years with Dorothie were among the hap­piest in his life, and his attempts to describe the erotic can be seen as an extended love letter to her.

At the begin­ning of the film, we are simply presented with sev­eral sequences of beau­tiful women, often nude, reciting poetry. We move from Haiti to Senegal to Brazil, from 1999 to 2002 to 2008. Are these love affairs simply cap­tured documentary-style? Then Leth pulls back the cur­tain. We see him in Brazil at a casting ses­sion. He’s looking for beau­tiful women for his film. He tells them he’s recre­ating memories of past love affairs, and each woman is to lounge naked on a hotel bed, reciting a poem (often his own — Leth was an accom­plished poet before he ever began making films) and sim­u­lating post-coital bliss. It’s a con­structed dream, and the women are paid to por­tray memories and feel­ings they’ve never had.

It’s undoubtedly beau­tiful to look at, but it’s not erotic because these are not my memories or my fantasies. But Leth raises all kinds of issues with his honest desire to pursue his vision of erot­i­cism. He’s a savvy film­maker and a man of vast exper­i­ence of the world. He must know that the places he’s chosen to travel to doc­u­ment erot­i­cism (Eastern Europe, Thailand and the Philippines in addi­tion to the coun­tries men­tioned above) have been places where sex traf­ficking takes place. Places where women sell them­selves (or are sold) to men as can­vasses for whatever fantasies they want to pro­ject. Though Leth is clear to the women that he’s not making por­no­graphy, the dynamic is the same. He’s a rich white Westerner who is offering money to women to do sexual things. It raises the ques­tion as to whether all male con­cepts of the erotic involve the same thing. We are aroused by looking, by seeing, by cap­turing and by keeping what isn’t neces­sarily ours. We often pay to pre­tend it is. There is a whole scale of activ­ities, from staring at beau­tiful women on the subway train, to staring at them naked in magazines or strip clubs, to paying them for more and more sim­u­la­tion. This kind of erot­i­cism is con­structed, it’s not real. The inter­esting thing about Leth’s pro­ject is that the act of making a film is also a way of con­structing a reality that is not real. Eroticism, like cinema, is a con­structed reality. He is cap­turing, trying to hold onto, some­thing that is eth­ereal (memory) and untame­able (female desire/love). It’s a film that could only be made by a man closer to the end of his life than the beginning.

In Leth’s per­sonal life story, the erotic often equates with the exotic. He loves women unlike those in his native Denmark. He likes dark skin and hair, warm cli­mates and sen­sual music. In these places, women often seem more sub­missive. They have no problem playing their parts in his movie. Like actors, they don’t mind that he is giving them the lines they are to read. I sus­pect that many women in the “developed” world will see this film and think Leth is just an unre­con­structed sexist. I’m not sure I’d agree, but I do hope that his hon­esty and vul­ner­ab­ility might lead to more open dis­cus­sion of the dif­ferent expres­sions of erot­i­cism. The film is a bit like a mirror. What you think about it will very much depend on what you see in the mirror.

(9/10)

Tagged as: #tiff10, aging, denmark, memory, sexuality

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