Director: Stephen Sayadian (as Rinse Dream)
Screenplay: Stephen Sayadian (as Rinse Dream)
Cast: Lauren Brice; Tom Byron; Harry Jabarr;
Sharon Kane; Stephanie Page; Paula Price; Joey Silvera; Tianna
"Mention On the Waterfront and she gets randypants"
With his reputation mainly
cemented in cinema by Cafe Flesh (1982),
the career of Stephen Sayadian is
sadly miniscule. Neither is it helped that, as most of his career is in
pornographic films, they are a) maligned as a result, b) beholden to rights
issues from porn distributors, who may not necessarily seen them more as mere titillation,
and c) are at least difficult to access in the United Kingdom, where
unfortunately our laws do not take this into consideration and it is
financially impractical for any distributor to release such films as they would
only be allowed in licensed sex shops. The one non-pornographic film in his
career, Dr. Caligari (1989), is also
worthy of rediscovery by itself, a weird film which proved Sayadian's vision was not
restricted to filming real sex, able to tackle perversity with his canny
trademarks, such as his also staccato and postmodern dialogue. Sadly, that film
was a one-off.
After Dr. Caligari he returned to pornography for the last films of his
directing career, shot on video work like two sequels to Nightdreams (1981), a collaboration with director Francis Delia but was affirmatively a Rinse Dream production. Nightdreams,
in honesty, was a compilation of sex scenes, but Sayadian's background in advertising and poster design meant that, alongside
his scripts, his visual eye is just as striking, embracing a palpably warped
sense of strong colour and distinct props.
Nightdreams 3 is a film that compromises and accepts being entirely
porn, a literal series of scenes based around a threadbare structure of a
female doctor, Dr. Sledge (Lauren Brice),
who deals with sex therapy and is openly a voyeur. All the film is shot in the
same soundstage and, intercutting scenes of sex never seen fully, feels a
likely piece to Nightdreams 2, which
was shot the year before. If you are here for the ambition of the early Rinse Dream films, the first Nightdreams is still an aesthetically
bold work, whilst this second sequel would be disappointing. Where it gets
interesting is how in an extreme minimalism, Nightdreams 3 is a weird film. A deeply weird film even if it could have been more and also deliberately
constructed as such, showing the director still has his touch.
The elephant in the room is that
this is porn. Not said as a dismissal, and not necessarily ethics of the form
neither in this particular review, nor in artistry, but whether a viewer can
engage with watching other people having real sex beyond said titillation.
Morals can take an important part in this subject of the virtues or lack of in
porn - even if you are neither a pro-sex feminist or an advocate of Andrea Dworkin - but the notion of the
viewer's gaze (not necessarily a male one) has an effect especially if you are
bring a viewer's gender and sexuality to how they react to the sex. There is
also the obvious, and less pretentious comment, of whether it becomes boring to
watch porn if you have no intention to masturbate to it, which is a
significantly more profound question than that sounds, as it asks whether
pornography can grow beyond an ephemeral product to an actual piece of worth.
Artistry is definitely a concern
here as Rinse Dream films are
distinct in deliberately alienating their target audience, and in honesty,
whether the form of pornography is defendable as art or not, I will argue what
adult actors and especially adult actresses do in films, especially in the
current day, is a form of physical performance that is not thought about. For
actresses especially, who in a form of irony become the most significant
figures in these films even with all the concerns of objectification and latent
misogyny that might be involved in individual productions, they have a
willingness to be bared in a literal gynaecological form that should be held in
greater admiration, as few people would willingly do so filmed or even in their
own bedrooms, and especially with the insane level of dexterity it requires
sometimes, this means even more.
One thing that is important, and
has been a huge moral issue, is that porn is a heightened and exaggerated form
of sexuality, where the performers' bodies are fetished and exaggerated, the
concern when we presume this is what sex is especially for impressionable
people, presuming they can merely get to some of the positions rather than with
conversation, having an open minded sexual partner or two, and a lot of good
cardio. Even if you view this film as titillation, which to be honest Nightdreams 3 was clearly meant to be, Stephen Sayadian has always played to
this exaggerated to an extreme. How you deal with Nightdreams 3 is that as a narrative, it is vague, but it is
intentionally exaggerated, distorted, repeated and even done in off-putting and
un-titillating ways.
There is the other issue of
whether you can watch another person's body this much up close too. The real
corpus, tangible and flawed human body is there even in all the strange
positions, extreme kinks and silicon enhancement involved, and not everyone in
comfortable with this. The issue porn has, beyond whether prolonged real sex
can actually engage beyond the reptile brain urge to procreate, is also whether
this exaggeration can mean anything else. I will not argue Nightdreams 3 will - go to Cafe
Flesh for something more interesting - and stereotypes of porn's idealised
erotic woman (and man too) are problematic. Non binary males and gay and
bisexual women will at least have an issue with this film for how limited and
frankly boring they might find the sex scenes between the female cast is.
What is interesting, if porn is a
ritual of exaggerated sexuality, is how legitimately and deliberately weird the
film is in its exaggeration. Where Nightdreams,
the original film, had actual nightmares and Wall of Voodoo on the soundtrack, even a piece of toast playing a
saxophone, this second sequel is repetitive, arguably the equivalent of
minimalist music in its continuous repetition.
You still experience a feverish
atmosphere with barely a set in this film, baring the alarming amount of
unexploded artillery shells lying around a medical building which are never
explained once, nor is the bust of Beethoven sternly watching over the sex on a
bare metal framed bed that looks closer to a torture device. The world of Nightdreams 3 (which is mostly purple,
blue and green) is a world drenched in hazed and scored to the type of
dreamlike soundtrack that would birth the Vaporwave movement in the 2010s, only
with bizarre squeaks and industrial noise that, set to merely white credits on
a black screen, last at least a good couple of minutes.
The little plot follows an
obsession of Stephen Sayadian's of
strong woman, a porn director and writer who yet, for all the objectification
of their bodies even in the non pornographic Dr. Caligari, always writes strong women with insatiable appetites
for sex against men who are merely bystanders or frigid. The lead here is the
same, an anti-heroine and doctor whose treatments for patients goes further
than her female senior appreciates, only for her own sexual desires to be easy
for Dr. Sledge to use to gain power over here.
Performance art is arguably the
only way to explain some pornography. That exaggeration, a fetishishtic
obsession with every peroxide blonde lock and piece of clothing, alien to gonzo
work shot in cameras on the hoof, but still existing whenever a brazen (even
deliberately kitsch) amount of colour or an odd prop is in the location. This
is also a thing Rinse Dream ran with
throughout his career, whose work in his graphic and photographic art sculpted
his visuals, even his actors. Here he is subdued and clearly working on very
limited means, but that does not stop everything having a striking look, from a
clear fixation (unless of the time) of everyone male and female having slicked
back hair, to the unexpected appearance of a bedside cabinet sunk slanted in
the ground to be writhed upon. Lauren Brice in the strictness sternness in her
features, and command, even evokes Madeleine
Reynal in Dr. Caligari baring
the distinct arm movements and penchant for cigarettes.
The dialogue as well is
idiosyncratic, and whilst it takes a while to appear, you can relish the
absurdity of lines of people being "ravenous
for boy jerky" or Dr. Sledge being described as being "a cupcake full of strychnine ". It
is inherently quotable, still as if he ingested the influence of post modernism
in his mixing of antiquated slang with bold descriptive comments with a clipped
style to them. The repetition applied to this as well as he will taking shots
of certain dialogue and repeat them over scenes, which considering the film's video
format, feels like how one would find material edited and repeated in loops. That
repetition is something that can easily be perceived, reading this, as occasional.
No, it is repetitional, constantly cutting to the shot of the line being spoke
in the midst of sex scenes over and over and over again with an attempt at
being hypnotic.
The result by the end, when Dr.
Sledge seduces her boss to gain power control over her, becomes such a
repeating barrage of stimulus that it does eventually drill itself into your
brain if you let it. The other aspect, which is even more likely to have alienated
him from his career in the media, is to continually add deliberately off-putting
content. When he intercuts different sex scenes in the same time line, it does
have a striking effect. Here, however, there is also an inherent creepiness to
everything, and whilst there are no rat men like in Cafe Flesh, there is the grunginess of the entire environment and
that most of the sex scenes are on the barest of metal framed beds. His
interest in blurring gender, whether progressive in the modern day or not, is a
surprising detail, one of the lead's patients a woman who wants to transition
to a man. Nothing in the subplot, the barest of them, is inherently
transphobic, only with the fact Dr. Sledge goes to have sex with the husband,
who reacts negatively, and that the patient is merely looking strung out on
"testostereeny" on a dirty floor as a nice bed was unfortunately not
available.
The repetition and successive
cuts also have a disconcerting edge, no longer lengthy sex scenes but the
ending up instead a hypnotising effect that leaves you dirty. The film's final
shot, when Dr. Sledge bends her boss into a submissive, is a close up of the
other's mouth screaming, which after the repetition and constant use of the
phrase by Sharon Kane of "Give
suck", feels like a psychological breakdown than an orgasm. Out of
what I have seen, Cafe Flesh is
still more rewarding than this, and arguably Dr. Caligari is Sayadian's
best work, as much for the fact you do not have the prolonged real sex scenes
to disrupt the pace. But from initial disappointment came something peculiar
with Nightdreams 3. Not a great film
but one that, in the midst of limited means and whose existence can be
questioned, is a good argument for auteurism, and one as already mentioned
which is definitely a bizarre thing to experience.
Abstract Spectrum: Erotic/Grotesque/Minimalist/Repetitious/Weird
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low
