Over the years filmmakers have experimented with the best formats in
which to present eroticism. As a general rule, they seem to have concluded
that steamy sex goes best with crime, and romantic sex goes best with
comedy and light drama. The writer of Sex and Consequences can at least be commended for
originality and "thinking outside the box," because this script is something
new entirely: the erotic tragedy. And I don't know about you, but nothing
turns me on more than mental anguish over the loss of a loved one!
Joan Severance plays the lead, performing nude scenes at age 47, after
having kept her clothes on for about a decade. Profile for Murder and In Dark
Places, which showed some Severance flesh, were released in 1996-1997, but
even then she was moving away from nudity. Those films had relatively subtle
exposure, but a year earlier Severance had used a body double for some
vigorous and revealing sex scenes in Black Scorpion. Her great frontal scene
in Red Shoe Diaries dates back to around 1992.
Severance plays a suburban housewife whose mental health is fragile
because of an incident in which her carelessness led to the death of her
daughter. She chooses as therapy the same thing that has worked for grannies
throughout recorded history: seducing a high school boy. The kid is content
to comply with her needs since: (1) hey, she may be fiftyish, but she's still
Joan Severance and still looks great, especially her legs which are still
just about the best gams on the planet; (2) she drops little hints that keep
him interested, subtle things like, "Take advantage of your time with me,
because I will do all sorts of things girls your age are just not ready
for." This immediately gets him running to the internet to look up the
proper procedures for such arcane practices as the Cleveland Steamer, the Dirty
Sanchez, the Tijuana Taxi and, of course, the dreaded Rear Admiral.
As the pair spend more and more time together, Severance wants to
increase the risk of being discovered by her husband. She wants to make love with the boy
until her husband's car is in the driveway. She wants to take nude Polaroids
of the lad and leave them for her husband to see. The young man is
understandably terrified of this trend, since the husband is a hot-tempered
fellow who carries a gun in his work as a grizzled beat cop, and is already
being pushed to the edge by his wife's erratic behavior following the tragic
loss of their daughter.
Hot stuff, eh?
As Austin Powers might say, "Am I making you horny?"
This lubricious erotic environment is made even tinglier by Joanie's
trips to the cemetery to place flowers on her daughter's tomb, and to have
long talks with the departed.
The "hook" of the film, if it can be called that, is the audience's
curiosity about why Severance is engaging in such provocative high-risk
behavior. It is clear that she is leading herself and her young beau into a
violent confrontation with the husband, and it seems apparent from the first
ten minutes of the film that her mental state has deteriorated far enough
that she can't be restored to health and must lead herself to tragedy. It isn't
exactly clear why she has chosen this particular young man, or what kind of
mad logic drives her to this sort of jeopardous behavior. We can see that
she is not really motivated by sexual lust, but we aren't really clear what
does motivate her.
SPOILERS
As it turns out, the identity of the specific boy is irrelevant. She chose him only because he
happened to be there, and she chose a vigorous young boy in general because
she felt it would be the one thing which would be most irritating to her
husband. Her apparent motivation is that she wants to die, but she doesn't
want to commit suicide so she can be reunited with her daughter in heaven,
so her only option is to provoke her husband into killing her. Mission
accomplished. Her plan leads to one of the most bizarre endings I've
ever seen in a movie - not the murder, which comes off as expected, but the
aftermath. The husband comes into a restaurant and blows her
away. The situation becomes chaotic, but the sound gradually diminishes and
the scene fades to black. The visuals return for one final scene: she and her daughter are together again,
chatting away and looking at a beautiful romantic sunset together. WTF? Is
this a memory - he final conscious thought before she dies? Is this life
after death? The movie doesn't say. It just stops there and rolls the end
credits over the sunset. (The original title of the film was "The Last
Sunset," and IMDb still lists it under that name.)
End SPOILERS
The film seems to have been shot through a variety of
filters using extreme saturation and/or highly artificial
lighting. As a result, the film looks less like live action than one of those rotoscoped films like A Scanner Darkly, in which the actors have been turned
into cartoons with various photo imaging techniques. The erotic scenes not
only resemble cartoons - and dark cartoons at that - but they are edited in
such a way as to reveal only brief glimpses of Joan's flesh. I assume that
all of this was done to disguise the lines and sags of the leading lady, but
I'll be damned if I can see any reason for it. Severance looks about as good
as any woman can look at her age, and would have been plenty sexy even if
shot straight-on in natural light. Why not just let her be what she is and
show it accurately? In this day and age, a really hot fiftyish woman can
still be appealing, even with a few droopy and wrinkly bits here and there.
If I had to pigeonhole the film into a genre, I'd call the film a melodrama with strong
sexual elements. It's not an erotic movie because the film's tragic premise,
dwelling as it does on death and madness, is enough to deflate your
erection, and the exaggerated photographic techniques may make your
testicles withdraw completely. It has a lusty moment here and there, but is
just not erotic enough to pass as a sexy B-movie. Since the quality of the
writing and photography is not exactly Oscar caliber (Corbin Bernsen plays
the husband, if that gives you any indication), the film will have a
difficult time finding any audience at all, except for those of us who are
just die-hard Severance fans and are curious about her return to nudity
after nearly ten years.
