Director: Cynthia Roberts
Screenplay: Cynthia Roberts and Greg
Klymkiw
Cast: Nina Hartley as Bubbles
Galore; Tracy Wright as Vivian Klitorsky; Daniel MacIvor as Godfrey Montana; Shawna
Sexton as Dory Drawers; Annie Sprinkle as God; Andrew Scorer as Buck Lister; Sky
Gilbert as Rip; Peter Lynch as Dick; Ed Fielding as Jimmy Remington
In terms of oddities forgotten in
time, a Canadian comedy crime sexploitation film, set at Christmas, with real
life adult film star and pro-sex activist/educator Nina Hartley as a former star turned porn director, with porn star/
sexologist Annie Sprinkle as God, is
as idiosyncratic as you can get. It's a very low budget film with some quirks to
say the least; those who can appreciate this however would get a lot out of a
really low budget and resourceful pulp film that's difficult to categorise. Notably
this is a film by a female director, who co-wrote the script, that's proudly
sexy but hates its chauvinistic male porn producers and goons with a passion,
which means the entire notion of the cinematic gaze in terms of gender is
upended whilst being proudly feminist in its own erotic way.
I had no knowledge of Cynthia Roberts. I didn't even know the
film was Canadian, set in a wintery environment around Christmas, until you see
the red and white maple leaf flag proudly waving in one scene. Bubbles Galore
is also very much an improvised production, stealing shots in a real hotel and
outside environments, mostly set in rooms whose distinct bright lighting have a
pronounced affect on the mood. It looks like a George Kuchar film shot if it met the mid-nineties - plastic colours,
a fuck ton of pink lighting, and low budget digital layering effects are to be
expected.
Premise wise, Hartley is Bubbles Galore, who is in the
midst of trying to shoot a film with Dory Drawers (Shawna Sexton), who despite being a visibly voluptuous and
attractive woman is a virgin, leading Galore to want to teach her to play the
perfect innocent protagonist of her new film. Her assistant Vivian Klitorsky (Canadian
mainstream actress Tracy Wright) is
openly gay, a cynical person who is however in love with Bubbles, making her
uncomfortable when Galore is more interested in Dory romantically during the
production. A scuzzy porn filmmaker, who once had Bubbles as his star, is
jealous and wants to sabotage her film to force her back as his property, even
if it means targeting a veteran male star, now a drunk with erectile dysfunction,
to plant a mole on her set.
Casting Nina Hartley was the film's wisest choice from the get-go.
Alongside her work in pro sex education later in her life, Hartley is fascinating as someone who started in the eighties but
is utterly different from the outsider's stereotype of what a female porn star.
Looking closer to a school teacher, helped by a calm but subtly authoritative
voice, Hartley in interviews has
sounded as an incredibly strong voice, in the early nineties onwards making it
a mission to teach sexual education to adults, and bucking trends in ageism as
she still works in the adult medium. She could have also starred in mainstream
cinema as she's good in the film. Really, really good, commanding a film where
a lot of the cast can be broad, only Wright
contrasting as the sarcastic assistant who shares a charismatic chemistry with
her. Hartley is great, and with Wright, the large part of the film being
a romantic tale between them makes the eventual honesty they show in their love
for each other sweet.
In completely honesty, whilst I
really enjoyed the film, Bubbles Galore
is a mess at times, one which like a few micro budget films I've seen is
obsessed with long scenes of nothingness. It's a playful indulgence you have to
come to enjoying subjectively in the end to be fully able to appreciate this
type of cinema, moments repeated and sprawling in a pleasure of insignificant
things to the tip of experimentation. The best example, the closest thing (if
done more) Bubbles Galore would've
become abstract, is a never ending montage (with individual shots repeated over
and over again) between Bubbles doing a sexy photo shot for a feminist
magazine, the lead villain having an incestuous side revealed with a fantasy of
his mother playing out, and what can only be described as two of his thugs
roughing up the old drunken stud, to make him complicit to their goals, by
pinning him to a hotel bed as one twists around his elephantine (and rubber)
knob whilst the other wanks into his face.
The biggest surprise many would
have seeing Bubbles Galore is, from
a female creator, that it's a film openly embracing titillation and
transgression, which will come as a shock as the 2010s onwards have seen this
type of material as problematic, not even considering a women actually
directing and co-writing it. The film is softcore, everyone barring Wright naked at times, with the
exception of oral sex which I am going to presume, considering they are used at
least for one character, is done with the male cast having fake stunt cocks. The
transgression is much more shocking nowadays, especially as Bubbles Galore is meant to be a pro-sex
comedy. The male characters barring the old stud, an old flame of Bubbles, are
scumbags using some exceptionally sexist and crass language, objectifying
women. There is, which is never explicit, a rape scene which might put people
off, notably in mind however in a film where every female character is entirely
sympathetic, always on the side of the underdog we route for, and literally
under the eye of a female God with female dancing angels. So the film does come
from a mind that the sex when positive is very
positive, fun on the porn shot with
Hartley in a devil costume by a Christmas tree at one point and a hunky skinny
guy in a bear costume, and Bubbles romances with two other characters played as
romantic and sensual.
The result is a curious mix,
coming from an era of indie transgressive filmmakers like Greg Araki etc. where bad taste and genre pulp were blended together,
here with the notable difference however that it's a feminist film of sincerity
and camp. The kind for an acquired taste certainly, but encountering a pro-sex
film made by woman on and off-screen is certainly a distinction still, one full
of vibrant colour and energy that wears its low budget with pride.
Abstract Spectrum: Camp
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None
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