Starring: Dakota Johnson, Jamie Dornan, and Eloise Mumford
Distributor: Universal Pictures
Runtime: 125 mins. Reviewed in Feb 2015
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This American movie is based on the first novel of a trilogy of the same name by E. L. James (which is a pseudonym), which began life as Twilight fan fiction. The author’s “Fifty Shades” trilogy has sold millions of copies, and the first instalment has been brought to the cinema with erotic intent which reflects the thrust of the book.
The film tells the story of a graduate student, Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson), who is asked as a favour by her best friend, Kate Kavanagh (Eloise Mumford), to interview a troubled millionaire, Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan), for her journalism assignment. She goes to his office in the Grey House, Seattle, and is summoned into the interview with the by-line call, “Mr. Grey will see you now”.
Christian is very good-looking, very rich, and totally intimidating, and Ana finds herself attracted immediately to him. Christian is obsessed with the desire “to exercise control in all things”. Against Christian’s own warning, she finds herself drawn into his controlling world, and becomes a participant (“willing”, the movie says) in his fantasies of sexual domination.
The film is advertised as an erotic love affair between an innocent, attractive young woman and a handsome, domineering male, but there is no way of hiding the fact that the film reinforces male abuse of women and aggression towards them. It shows many scenes of bondage and sadism in Christian’s Playroom, “The Red Room of Pain”, and tries to explore new ways of romancing by exposing the viewer to what it considers is the untold nature of uninhibited sexual attraction.
Christian’s chosen way of control in sexually intimate situations is to subject the woman he desires to masochistic sexual practices that are visibly demeaning, practices that give him pleasure. With time, Ana comes to “enjoy” what he does, and she allows herself to explore his need in relation to what she thinks are also her own desires.
The film is about a male using power to subject a woman to do his bidding. In this film, the rationalisation of this behaviour, which is totally immoral, is that a woman can best aspire to sexual ecstasy by knowing and experiencing hurt or pain in the first instance, which then leads her to the experience of profound pleasure. For years, “rape myths” of such a kind, which this rationalisation represents, have been male arguments made to legitimise violence toward women.
The film is not hard edged porn. It is soft-porn titillation.The sex scenes are not very explicit, and female nudity is mostly on display. However, the intended themes of the movie are perfectly clear. This movie is cliched, stereotyped film-making that pursues commercial appeal by bringing to the screen events or situations that demean women by illustrating how good it is for them to endure, and ultimately enjoy, male sexual control.
There is another theme, the film hopes the viewer will find, behind Christian’s and Ana’s intense attraction to each other: Ana can best realise her love of Christian only by truly understanding him, and to do that she needs to participate actively in, and share, his private fantasies. To try to find that theme is buying a line that this shallow romance movie clearly wants to sell.
This is a glossy, stylish, seductively packaged film, that is directed, produced and marketed – for special appreciation, we are told, on Valentine’s Day – so as not to appear excessively objectionable. It escalates the sexual tension cleverly between its two main leads, and what is not on the screen is left to the viewer for fantasy to embellish. Christian is a complex person whose pathology is explored by the film in a very superficial and unsophisticated way, with standard appeal to past child abuse. First and foremost, however, the film focuses upon, and communicates, male sexual desire about how a woman should submit and what is good for a woman to do. It violates human dignity.
This reviewer acknowledges the existence of erotic cinema as a valid form of film-making. Recent examples of very good movies in this category are “Blue is the Warmest Colour” (2013), “Under the Skin” (2013), and “Her” (2013). This movie is no where near their class. It is acted convincingly by Dakota Johnson, and is not as bad an example of film-making than it could have been. Basically, however, it is a one-sided, misguided depiction of a male who needs to experience sexual control, and wants others to share his pleasure with him.
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