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CHEEKY (aka TRANSGRESSIONS) (2000)
DVD (region 0)
d. Tinto Brass; pr. Tinto Brass; scr. Tinto Brass, Carla Cipriani Nicolaj Pennestri, Silvia Rossi, Massimilaino Zanin; ph. Massimo De Venanzo; ed. Tinto Brass; m. Pino Donaggio; cast. Yuliya Mayarchuk, Francesca Nunzi, Jarno Berardi (89 mins)
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Lighthearted Erotica from a Genre Maestro
Tinto Brass’ films reveal a distinct progression: from his avant-garde experimentation to provocative, taboo-breaking analyses of the attractive aberration of sexual power play through to comparatively light celebrations of sexual freedom, guilt-free promiscuity and an obsessive regard for the female posterior.
Although much decried for the sense of grotesque sexual tableaux in many films, he seemingly mellowed and by the end of the 1990s had become Italy’s premier eroticist, developing a cult following across Europe. However, very few of his films since 1983’s The Key have been regularly distributed outside of the European sphere of influence, and so his international reputation rests on Caligula alone. Cheeky is commonly considered one of Brass’ lightest soft-core sex comedies, likened by at least one English reviewer to a kind of continental Carry On movie, but with decidedly more explicitness amidst its innuendo. Thus, as Brass built his controversial career on a morally ambiguous dissection of sexual power in such as Salon Kitty, Caligula and The Key, Cheeky epitomizes his effort to find some transcendent hope in sexual relations and has ironically been dismissed as, in comparison, simply innocuous. Nevertheless, it is perhaps best considered as the point where Brass states his idea of sexual “innocence” without the context of human baseness that saturated so much of his best work.
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Synopsis (contains spoilers)
Cheeky concerns a young couple. Carla (Yuliya Mayarchuk) is a very carefree, light and energetic woman who moves from Venice to London in order to find a place for her and her boyfriend (Jarno Berardi) to move into.
She soon meets a real estate agent (Francesca Nunzi) who develops a lesbian interest in her. The curious Mayarchuk succumbs and soon develops a sexual relationship with Nunzi, but doesn’t tell her boyfriend about it, being fully awareness of his jealous, possessive nature. After further encounters, Mayarchuk realizes that her newfound lesbian lover is just as jealous as is her boyfriend. Berardi meanwhile is driven to fantasize about his Mayarchuk, his fantasies inspired by his imaginings of her presumed infidelity. He has difficulty reconciling his suspicions of betrayal with the sexual turn-on that such speculation proves to be for him. Instead, he obsesses about a piece of graffiti concerning jealousy driving a man mad with desire. When Berardi eventually comes to England, he is obsessed with thoughts of his girlfriend’s betrayal and finds her with Nunzi. Fixated, jealous and turned-on in equal parts, he eventually storms out. As he wonders through Hyde Park, he spies an old-man happily and excitedly spying on his own wife with another man. Berardi now wonders whether he can reconcile his own sexual turn-ons to his sense of possessiveness.
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Promiscuity and Feminity with the European Sex Farce
The dialectic between sexual freedom and sexual power runs sub-textually throughout Cheeky, though never weighing the film down.
Indeed, the culturally-coded expectations of gender conduct form the background to the film and Mayarchuk’s departure from such codes of sexual conduct enables Brass to criticize such modes. Thus, Mayarchuk’s free sexuality, her bisexual promiscuity is held up as a pure sexuality, evidence of Brass’ ideal woman, one who remains innocent despite her sexual experience. In this, Brass seems intent to break down the idea that it is sexuality alone that separates the symbolic state of Innocence from that of Experience. Experience is not the sexual awakening of an innocent, but is the force of cultural repression – that which would negate, codify and deny the free sexuality found in Innocence. Experience is that which taints a free sexual expression with impurity or guilt: it is an external imposition. For Brass then, cultural expectations of monogamous sexual conduct are anathema to true sexual innocence and freedom. Hence, the film’s dilemma concerns equally that of Mayarchuk, having to hide her nature, and that of Berardi, a man whose deeply ingrained expectations of gender conduct conflict with his own erotic feelings towards his girlfriend’s actions. For Brass then, infidelity is a natural sexual behaviour and it is only patriarchy that has moulded such into betrayal. Furthermore, “betrayal” is hence a sexual stimulant due to its prominence as another socially imposed “taboo”.
Possessiveness is the ultimate aberration here, the imposition of a hypocritical masculine culture.
Berardi’s dilemma is that he cannot reconcile his cultural conditioning with his personal desire. Cultural gender expectation tells him that women should be obedient, not promiscuous and always loyal; however, he is turned on by the very thought of his girlfriend’s promiscuity and such become aids to his sexual imagination, potentially even bringing them closer together as a couple – in an idealized sexually free utopia untainted by the habituation of a patriarchal culture regarding decadence and power. No-one is immune to conditioning, as the lesbian Nunzi also succumbs to a pathological possessiveness, Brass suggesting that it is her obsession with power structures that leads her to duplicate ingrained heterosexual notions; qualities which threaten to masculinize her. In the battle between Innocence and Experience thus, it is the cultural expectation of sexual conduct which corrupts and threatens to destroy the innocence Brass sees in the post-feminist celebration of young woman’s open sexuality. This is of course the paradox of male erotica / exploitation and Brass once again proves amazingly adept at working subversive critiques of patriarchal sexual mores into material often presumed as male titillation. Even in such light fare as Cheeky, his subversive challenges to conventional sexual morality show through.
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Mirrored Art-Deco from a Rear Admiral
The widescreen letterbox transfer captures the openness surrounding Mayarchuk and the cramped enclosures around Berardi – as if his influence threatens to entrap her.
The opening Hyde Park scenes establish the sexual playfulness Brass considers essential to innocence. Nudity recurs throughout and Brass’ fondness for symmetrical compositions, searching camerawork and almost art-deco settings is found, notably in the lesbian bathhouse scene. Brass’ sense of sexual tableaux is found in the party scene, which recreates an infamous sequence from Pasolini’s Salo but denies the grotesque, fascistic power that accompanied it. This indicates Brass’ apparent intent to remove the taint of sexual power and cultural coding from the display of erotic imagery and reclaim it – in the process both evoking and departing from his own more controversial works. Mirrors and frames-within-frames feature self-consciously and slow-motion is used sporadically for erotic effect (making the bath-house scene directly refer to the priestesses of Isis scene in Caligula). The film’s cheerfulness is preserved in this transfer, despite only moderate clarity and awkward black levels. Nudity is always self-conscious as demonstrated in the reverse striptease scene which Mayarchuk begins naked and vulnerable, gaining power and self-image as she dons her dress for the party. Fantasy and memory are nicely evoked at regular stages.
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Updating the European Sexploitation Comedy to the C21st through Musical Allusion
The sound transfer in Dolby Digital mono is moderately effective but decidedly lacking in any substantial presence.
The musical score ideally captures the playful, fun atmosphere but is always flat and centred, feeling also a little muted. It does nicely recapture the sound of the soft-core European sexploitation films of the late 1960s and early 1970s. However, the poor English dubbing (with no subtitle option) has a somewhat caricatured approach to accent and character. This adds to its amiability perhaps, but negates the underlying examination of social taboos in favour of light sex-comedy, perhaps even more than Brass intended, with the innocent Mayarchuk as something of a traditional Monroe-like bubblehead. Backgrounds can offer only a very minor sense of any external atmosphere or surrounding presence and it is left to the dubbed voices and the score to carry the film through. Isolated, self-contained set-pieces like the bath-house and the party scene do, however, function well at establishing their own aural space within which the interaction and power-games between voices is charted. With background ambient noises muted, the foley effects of footsteps and suchlike stand out too much. Mayarchuk’s giggly cheerfulness nicely suggest he combination of childishness and sexual awareness that makes the character so attractive to Brass. A beach-fantasy makes nice use of such giggling, mixed with breaking waves.
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Special Treats for the Cinema-going Eroticist
There are several special features, including an original trailer for the film, also dubbed, under the original English release title of Transgressing.
There is a Brass filmography and a select title list (but no previews) from the distributor’s catalogue. Of primary interest is the subtitled interview with Brass. Offering some behind-the-scenes footage (most notably of the lesbian bath-house scene) it allows Brass to talk about the film’s thesis of betrayal and jealousy as sexual excitement, concluding that the film is about “the pleasure of betrayal” and that betrayal itself is the most exciting taboo in any relationship. He expounds a little on his aesthetic appreciation of women’s behinds, indeed extending such into a philosophical statement of sorts before discussing the moral impositions of patriarchal culture on women’s natural sexuality (as he sees it) based on the male fear of female promiscuity. He talks of the novelty of the lesbianism in his work, and how he approaches filming a lesbian sex scene as different to a heterosexual one. The brief interview concludes with some publicity footage of the director and cast on a boat, promoting the Italian release of the movie. Brass finally reveals how he wants to explore sexuality without shame – and that it is cultural codification and expectation which make sex a dirty thing.
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THIS FILM IS NOT YET AVAILABLE ON BLU-RAY
USA DVD PURCHASE INFORMATION: Cheeky! (Producers Cut, Unrated, English Version)
UK DVD PURCHASE INFORMATION: Cheeky [2000] [DVD]
AUSTRALIA DVD PURCHASE: Transgressions
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