In one of many disturbing, provocative scenes in the American film Secretary, James Spader smacks Maggie Gyllenhaal's butt so hard that it turns purple, as she soon shows us.
And she adores it. She is hungry for more. She is a self-mutilating masochist who has finally found someone else to give her the pain she craves. She is falling in love.
In what may be one of the controversial battle-of-the-sexes films of the new millenium, Secretary, which played in the Toronto filmfest in the Contemporary World Cinema series, sets up a power relationship perilously tilted to the dark side.
Gyllenhaal is the secretary of the title and she is willingly submissive and deliberately inefficient so she can be punished.
Spader is her boss. He is an anal-retentive control freak whose taste in sexual perversity is just as unconventional as Gyllenhaal's. He is a sadist. But he is also morbidly afraid of falling in love, of losing even the faintest sense of control.
So this is a relationship forged in madness, heading towards hell and tinged with surprising comic outbursts.
As a socio-political commentary, Secretary -- which was adapted by director Steven Shainberg and screenwriter Erin Cressisa Wilson from a short story by Mary Gaitskill -- lacks a coherent point of view. The movie never tries to moralize. So everyone in the audience, from feminists to freaks to folks just watching a flick, will have to rely on their own instincts.
That is not an easy task here. The movie seems to lurch at times from light to dark, from happiness to horror, from merely sinful to downright savage. Intimacy and S&M tastes have that effect on people who are playing out such a strange story.
The actors absolutely sublimate their own personalities. Gyllenhaal (rising star Jake Gyllenhaal's sister) looks dumbstruck as the secretary who is taking her first-ever adult job after getting out of the comfort zone of a mental hospital. There is a kind of crazy light in her eyes, a set to her mouth that is somewhere between grim and grin. On screen, we like the girl -- but we're afraid of her too. It's a total performance.
As for Spader, he shuts down, eliminates every spark of emotion he has ever shown. Blank. Zero. Nada. Which makes him supremely dangerous as a character. He is unpredictable. Which sets up the kind of tension you get in a psychological thriller, not a love story.
Given the extreme visuals, such as the surreal design and subdued lighting of the funky suburban law office where Spader has set up his practice, the mood puts audiences into something akin to controlled panic. In the end, the movie is not about S&M or even sex and not even violence. It's about love.
(This film is rated R)
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