★★
“Desperate Living”
There’s a moment here which is probably a good litmus test for how you’ll react to this overall. The heroine, princess Emily (Bühlmann), opens a locket to look at the picture of her dead father. Only, it’s actually John Waters. If you do not know who that is, this film is probably not for you. If you do know who he is, understand why he is called the ‘Pope of Trash’, and have a limited tolerance for his kind of movies, it is probably not for you either: I fall into this category. I was at least forewarned by the synopsis: “A castle maid-turned-fugitive joins a group of sex workers to create a gang of female bandits that fight against the sexually deviant patriarchy.”
The maid thing is a little confusing. For Emily does bring along her maid Trizi (Muller), after she discovers her family is going to marry her off to an ugly aristocrat for financial purposes. But Trizi is ancillary to proceedings. They take refuge in the woods, and engage in some light highway robbery, before seeking refuge in a brothel which, I must say, is staffed by the most collectively ugly group of hookers I’ve seen. At least one of whom is male. Her mother (Prusa, who may be the best thing about the film) captures her and forcibly brings her back to the impending wedding. Only for her new friends to interrupt the ceremony with a heavily-armed objection to the nuptials.
It’s all heavily and deliberately anachronistic: the setting is almost traditional fairy-tale, but littered with modern technology, and copious amount of contemporary sexual freedom, which is portrayed as being the path to happiness. With the exception of Emily’s poor but noble boyfriend, Jozef (Althaus), who is utterly subservient and completely useless, men are evil swine, typically slaves to their sexual deviancies. Mind you, women aren’t much better: indeed, the feminist collective set up in the woods quickly starts to fall apart over ideological differences. I have to respect the way Monti seems thoroughly cynical about… well, everything. Going by the way things unfold, she seems generally to be in agreement with Chairman Mao: “Power grows out of the barrel of a gun”
The presence of Waters makes sense, because he would appear to be the spiritual father here, as much as he’s depicted as Emily’s actual father. In particular, this is consciously attempting to press the viewer’s shock buttons. Realizing this, largely negates the effort, and in the main, it ends up feeling like an exercise in trying far too hard. I kept expecting Udo Kier to show up; that might have helped a bit. Though as novel ways of death go, being killed by slipping on a severed penis, falling backwards from a window and getting impaled on a gravestone crucifix, certainly scores points for imagination. Again, how you react to the last sentence is a good indication of whether or not to bother with this. It’s probably less fun and more didactic than that makes it sound.
Dir: Carla Lia Monti
Star: Nina Bühlmann, Myriam Muller, Alexandra Prusa, Nils Althaus
a.k.a. Räuberinnen