Psycho-sexadelic: Soledad Miranda in Vampyros Lesbos

            The first time I ever heard of Vampyros Lesbos (1971), I was eighteen years old. It was a time of awakening for me in many ways. In the fall of 2008 I was starting my Bachelor’s in Music, planning to make my career out of my guitar. But even as I was devoting myself academically to the art of music, I was awakening to something else entirely. This journey had nothing to do with my schoolwork, and if my friends and family had known the extent of this burgeoning passion they may have been less than understanding.

            I was just beginning my first true exploration of cinema, but my tastes were nowhere close to refined. I’ve always loved movies, ever since my Dad showed me Star Wars (1977) when I was six. Every Saturday night was another classic blockbuster. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Back to the Future (1985), and even Flight of the Navigator (1986) passed before my unblinking eyes. When I saw Jaws (1975) at the age of seven, I was terrified that the shark was going to bust through the drain while I took a shower. But this first experience with a ‘horror’ film ignited a perverse little fire inside me. I wanted more.

From that point on, the scariest parts of movies were always my favorite parts. In E.T. the Extraterrestrial (1982) it was watching Elliot frozen with terror as the titular alien emerged from the shed in the backyard. Laura Dern discovering Samuel L. Jackson’s severed arm in Jurassic Park (1993), and Kirk Douglas battling to save the Nautilus from the giant squid in 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1954). As a kid I was always unable to completely follow my desire for horror (my parents warned about the dangers of such films!), but when I could I would sneak downstairs late at night to try and find some new cinematic terror being aired (albeit edited) on television. In high school I was able to eventually track down a few classics here and there, such as Frankenstein (1931), Psycho (1960), and Alien (1979).

            It was finally as a teenager enrolled in college that I was able to view all of the taboo features I had only dreamed of before! Friday the 13^th (1980) had always been glimpsed on the shelves at Blockbuster, and I would have to have been living under a rock to not know of Halloween (1978), The Exorcist (1973), or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). I consumed every single one of these films that I could readily find. But soon, the famous ones ran out. I took to the internet to find communities that loved the same genre that I was discovering. There I learned about the great Italian masters such as Dario Argento (Profondo Rosso [1975]; Suspiria [1977]) and Lucio Fulci (Zombie [1979]; The Beyond [1981]). The blood was redder, the shadows were darker, and everything was sexier. But even their filmographies are limited. The search always continues, and that is where I found Jess Franco.

            (Note: For those wanting a more complete overview of Franco’s work and their themes, check out my earlier essay ‘Venus in Furs: Jess Franco and Sexuality in Cinema’.)

            Vampyros Lesbos is the quintessential Jess Franco film. It is a quasi-retelling of the Dracula story set in the modern Mediterranean city of Istanbul. The twist is that the vampire is female, and she takes female victims! The film is a synthesis of everything good about Franco’s directorial style. The obsession, surrealism, ambiguity, and erotica finally achieve a perfect unity, thanks largely in part to the star Soledad Miranda playing the vampire who is at turns seductive, subdued, and sympathetic. Other hallmarks of Franco films, such as poor acting, sleaziness, and terrible special effects are thankfully absent. Like Tobe Hooper, whose success with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was due less to what it got right than what it didn’t get wrong, Franco’s direction of Vampyros Lesbos mostly avoids the pitfalls that sink some of his other pictures, such as the laughably bad gore effects in Devil Hunter (1981) or the hackneyed boredom of his Nazi living dead flick Oasis of the Zombies (1982).

            Soledad Miranda is perhaps the film’s single greatest strength. Words cannot describe her screen presence. She was born Soledad Rendόn Bueno on July 9, 1943. By her untimely death in a car accident at the age of 27 on August 18, 1970, she had acted in over thirty films. But the roles she is most remembered for were only released after the tragedy.

            Her allure is impossibly magnetic. Her dark, penetrating eyes give a cold grip to her beauty, but she is far more than a visual fixture as her acting talent goes far above and beyond any of Jess Franco’s other actresses. Her movements are subtle, masking the stoically deliberate performance she is creating. She becomes a rare thing in cinema, someone you would watch even if they were doing nothing at all.

            Miranda gave gutsy, show-stealing turns in other Franco works like Nightmares Come at Night (1970) and the excellent She Killed in Ecstasy (1971), but Vampyros Lesbos is by far her best and most essential performance. Alongside Ewa Strömberg as her willing victim, Miranda commands the screen from the very first frame, where we see her in a flowing, blood red silk scarf, reaching her slender hands directly towards the camera as if she is trying to reach the audience and bring them into the hallucinatory world she inhabits.

            Jess Franco seems to inherently understand the peculiar pull his starlet has and exploits it in every way, to great success. While Strömberg’s character drives the bare-bones story forward, not much really happens in Vampyros Lesbos. Mostly, it plays out as a psycho-surreal fever dream. The majority of the screen time is devoted to simply watching Soledad Miranda. We are in the bar audience that stares with rapt attention as she does a smoky striptease with a mannequin. Then we become flies on the wall as she hypnotically recounts the tale of how exactly she came to be the vampire. And finally we begin to slip with her into her delirium as she inwardly struggles with the soul-crushing despair of falling in love with her own victim. Throughout all of it, the actress manages to hold on to our attention with a vice-grip. If she hadn’t fallen victim to tragedy, I am convinced that Soledad Miranda would be a household name.

            The other facet that makes Vampyros Lesbos work as a film is Jess Franco’s comparative restraint. In most of his other exploitation features he packs the screen full of gratuitous nudity, graphic violence, and taboo sexuality. Here however, he manages to avoid the worst of all three. It’s not as though these elements aren’t present. It is called Vampyros Lesbos after all. It is simply more tasteful and less forward.

            Gory violence has always been Franco’s Achilles heel. Just look no farther than his take on the slasher Bloody Moon (1981), where the fakest looking decapitation scene in the history of cinema takes center stage! It may be that his productions never had the money for decent special effects, or it may be that he simply couldn’t figure out how to shoot them convincingly. Honestly, it’s probably a bit of both. In any case, Franco is at his best when bringing to the screen violence that is subtle and understated. And here he does so admirably. Vampire bites are limited to bright red lines of blood, and much of the violence has a slightly more erotic than evil bent. Even the director’s cameo as a sexually frustrated serial killer is more implied than anything else. This restraint serves to bolster the ambient, dream-like atmosphere that is core to the film’s success.

            There is of course a significant amount of nudity, but it is all presented to us in a much more artistic manner. Scored with a jazzy Euro-pop soundtrack, we are entertained with psychedelic moments of Soledad Miranda baring herself to the screen. But rather than graphic or leering, the scenes are almost baroque. There is an art-house sort of tone to the film, with shot compositions reminiscent of the best paintings of the Renaissance. As a result, they can hardly be considered scandalous. Instead, we are drawn in to viewing the film as art. It demands appreciation.

            In addition, the taboo nature of the lesbian central relationship ends up being glossed over because the sexuality of the characters involved just isn’t really the point. Miranda’s centuries-old vampire is not so much seeking sexual fulfillment from her victim, or even blood for that matter, as she is desperately searching for a connection with someone that can end her profound loneliness. This obsession with companionship drives her to the edge and causes her to act in ways that eventually lead to her downfall.

Throughout the film, Miranda appears to be the least dangerous vampire ever conceived. She does very little to hurt others, only becoming violent when threatened. Even so, when her existence is revealed she is hunted down because her being is incompatible with the world others have created. The resulting symbolism could be unpacked in a million different ways, but one is obvious: being unique can often be dangerous.

When I at last saw Vampyros Lesbos for the first time, it was on a low quality internet bootleg with poorly translated subtitles. But to be honest, I hardly even noticed that it was in German! What I did notice, in spite of the pixilation and frequent pauses for buffering, was Soledad Miranda. This is her film and her legacy. Her presence here is one of cinema’s great performances, and it deserves a place beside the likes of Marlon Brando in The Godfather (1972) and Orson Welles in Citizen Kane (1941). Anyone who claims to love movies owes it to themselves to check this one out.

So let’s enter this dream, shall we?

Fifty Shades of Grey: Sexuality and the Modern Book to Screen Adaptation

            “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but chains and whips excite me.” –“S&M” Rihanna

It is like Inception of the Hollywood production machine. A screen adaptation of a book culled from sexually-explicit fan fiction of a movie adaptation of a popular teen romance novel, which itself is essentially one more gussied up version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The Bard’s play itself goes through periods of popularity and backlash. The baby-boomer generation, who were privileged to witness Franco Zeffirelli’s landmark film adaptation Romeo and Juliet (1968), consider the work a great masterpiece. The millennials however almost universally seem to hate it, having been torturously subjected to it in high school English classes. It is a testament to the timelessness of the star-crossed lovers’ story that all it takes to make it popular again is a simple spit-and-polish job, and so we get Twilight.

The young adult romance novel has caught on to an almost disturbing degree. And with it we have been inundated with a cavalcade of big screen versions. They range from half-way decent (The Hunger Games [2012]) to downright terrible (Twilight: New Moon [2009]). As is the rule with any such runaway success, there comes the devoted fan base. One particular fan base for Twilight and others writes internet fiction that places their favorite characters in sexually explicit situations. From here sprang the first real adult novel of the genre, Fifty Shades of Grey.

The book follows Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey, who are similar, but legally distinct (as I’m sure the publishing contract says) from Bella Swan and Edward Cullen of Stephanie Meyers’ Twilight series. Grey is an enigmatic billionaire with a taste for (obviously poorly researched) S&M. Ana is a paper-thin shadow of a character whose only distinct qualities are that she is a college English major and has a habit of biting her lip (which many therapists I believe would consider a nervous tic). From there, our less-than dynamic duo engage in a sexual game of cat and mouse that has very little to do with catting or mousing and everything to do with indistinct boundaries between abuse and foreplay.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: as a novel, Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James is a literary disaster. It’s a nightmare of bad grammar, misspelled words, cheesy clichés, and some of the most poorly written, un-erotic sex scenes ever put to paper. It seems to be the ultimate proof that sex is not the only ingredient required for a sexy story. To titillate an audience, sex needs to be the icing on a cake made from character, setting, fantasy, and most importantly atmosphere. Without these things, sex often ends up committing that most grievous of entertainment sins: it becomes boring.

In spite of all this, E.L. James’ book has become a runaway best seller and spawned two subsequent installments, Fifty Shades Darker, and Fifty Shades Freed. Critically panned and categorically despised by anyone not in the ‘females aged 35 to 50’ demographic, the so-called ‘mommy porn’ saga has nevertheless gained a dedicated following, selling millions of copies worldwide.

Perhaps the chief reason why the phenomenon has grown is because of the characterization of the protagonist Anastasia Steele. Rather, the distinct lack of characterization. There really is no specific personality to Ana at all. Sure, she loves books. But so do most people picking up this… page-turner… But that seems to be the essence of this story’s success. Because Ms. Steele is pretty much an empty shell, readers are free to insert themselves into the role of Christian Grey’s muse. This sort of vicarious sexual adventure certainly has appealed to women everywhere who fantasize about what they cannot have: a super-rich, sexy, mysterious, powerful Adonis who can have any woman he could possibly desire, yet he chooses… you. As a result, the Grey popularity surge has become a multi-million dollar enterprise.

Numbers of this kind always pique the interest of Hollywood, so this year on Valentine’s Day Weekend, movie-goers gained the opportunity to see Anastasia and Christian get down on the big screen. With such problematic source material, it’s amazing that Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) is as good as it is.

Sam Taylor-Johnson, who previously directed the excellent John Lennon origin flick Nowhere Boy (2009), brings an imprecise but refreshing energy to her direction of the material. Jamie Dornan is a bit wooden as Christian Grey, but the space is more than filled by relative newcomer Dakota Johnson, who brings far more life to Ana than she ever had on the page.

There are a number of tiny details present in the film that allow Johnson to expand the character and make the role her own. When we first meet her, she has a woefully droll haircut, an obvious distaste for makeup, and a wardrobe that looks like it came from a Goodwill in Portland, Oregon. As the story progresses, and Ana enters her sexual awakening, her ensemble changes in step, gradually becoming at first more presentable, to fashionable, to finally by the films end an array of elegant dresses and outfits that highlight the womanhood she has emerged into.

Additionally, though the obligatory segments from the novel where Ana and Christian fight are just as shoe-horned in and sudden as they are in the book, Johnson manages to inject an authentic earnest into her struggle to understand Christian’s predilections. The final shot of the theatrical cut, which mirrors the couple’s dramatic separation with their first meeting, is the kind of cinematic motif that doesn’t usually make an appearance in rapidly produced blockbuster cash-ins. This audacious flare typifies the look and feel of Fifty Shades of Grey, with visual flourishes that owe much to the Italian giallo, with glossy surfaces, bright primary colors, and expertly crafted set pieces. Even the nudity is much more like the French classic Emmanuelle (1974) than Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls (1995). It’s classy as opposed to carnal.

About the sexuality in Fifty Shades of Grey… In spite of the stigma and trailers showcasing Christian’s ‘Red Room of Pain’, the naughty bits of the film only add up to about fifteen minutes out of the two hour run time. Not only that, but the tastefulness of the scenes in question far surpasses the rest of the film’s efforts. The novel is beyond graphic, describing every moment between our couple in sadistic, pornographic, grammatically incorrect detail. The movie chooses seduction over sadism, panning the camera over curves and brief glimpses of skin, without ever really getting graphic or going beyond the safe boundaries of the R-rating.

With that said, the content is definitely not for children. Though gratuitous nudity and sexuality were commonplace in the cinema during the 1970’s and 1980’s, it was largely paired down for an extended period since the mid-1990’s. Aside from a number of foreign films and a few steamy romances such as Original Sin (2001) (a remake of Francois Truffaut’s Mississippi Mermaid (1969), starring the porcelain beauty Catherine Deneuve), nudity in film as of late has been mostly brief. It can hardly be described as graphic.

Only in the past few years has there been a resurgence; a presence of sexual romance in films aimed squarely at adults. It is a refreshing change for an upcoming generation of movie-goers who have entered adulthood after teenage years backed to the gills with Disney and Pixar. A quick peek reveals that the recent flood of popular book adaptations are mostly to blame. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) and Gone Girl (2014) are just two of the dark and erotically graphic tales to grace multiplexes in recent years. Though it may seem cynical, the sure-thing financial nature of the book-to-pic flick allows the studios to get away with a bit more than the likes of American Pie (1999). The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is up to its eyeballs in sex, nudity, rape, and revenge. Nevertheless, adult content that would have earned the picture an NC-17 otherwise was passed uncut for the sake of an accurate depiction of the source (read: to please the book’s fan base). The success of these films may reflect the popularity of books on the New York Best-sellers list, but it also proves the desire of an adult audience to experience adult content free of the restraints of groups of teenagers and families lined up to see the next superhero extravaganza.

The greatest difference between the film and the source is the emphasis on sex positive behavior, safety, and consent. The lack of safe words in the novel creates an ethical minefield of near abuse that belies an underlying attitude of nihilism. Ana is beaten and restrained with no real promise of freedom. While that may be E.L. James’ personal fantasy world, she seems to have failed to do any amount of research at all into the lifestyle she attempts to depict. This oversight may be the single greatest weight that brings her novel crashing down.

The film makes considerably more effort in this area, giving Ana not only her choice of safe words (‘Yellow’ for slow down, ‘Red’ for stop), but making a considerable to-do about the farthest reaches of consent she could possibly need. Beyond that however, the truth of the matter is that Fifty Shades of Grey the movie goes to great lengths to present a view of sex and relationships that is founded upon mutual respect and understanding, no matter how difficult that understanding can be to reach.

Sex is as diverse as the human race, and so has been portrayed in film in a thousand different ways from a thousand different perspectives. In Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974), sex is used as a bridge between the guilt and shame of the past, and the self-destructive nihilism of the present. Pier Paolo Pasolini uses sex to celebrate life in his adaptation of The Decameron (1971) and to highlight economic and political class struggles in his infamous masterpiece Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975).

In Fifty Shades of Grey, a movie supposedly all about sex, the place of sexuality in the lives of the characters is as much politics as it is relationship. Ana and Christian bond over sexual exploration. He loves her simplicity, she loves his mystery. Sex lets them become part of each others’ lives, yet they seem incapable of interacting over coffee. They use it as a way to broker give and take, push and pull. As a result it becomes the crux of their interactions. Unlike most films of this nature, the emphasis on a purely sexual relationship is what leads to the eventual breakdown of the couple’s central romance. Rare in mainstream Hollywood is the production that promotes both healthy sexuality and committed relationship.

Finally, the soundtrack to the film is most directly representative of the alternate direction taken by Sam Taylor-Johnson in presenting the subject matter. Seduction versus sadism is made all the more distinct in the choice of accompanying music. Ellie Goulding singing “Love Me like You Do” and Beyonce slowing down her sultry “Crazy in Love” creates a heavy atmosphere that certainly contradicts any notion of floggings and canings. One might expect an industrial backdrop underlined by Alice in Chains or Marilyn Manson when seeing someone tied to the bed. But that is exactly why Fifty Shades of Grey succeeds as a film. It serves the needs of fans while expanding its influence to the storied history of cinema and regaling us with a breezy tale of forbidden romance and self-discovery.

It’s well worth a look, as long as you don’t read the book! Happy viewing!