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The Little Death

This is an extremely well-done film about a subject that is usually not addressed in today’s cinematic arts. The title is the English translation for Petite Mort which is French for orgasm. The director, screenwriter and one of the actors (known for his acting in House of Lies) is Josh Lawson. He has put together a brilliant story and production which looks at various sexual fetishes.

The subjects are mostly loving couples where one of the partners has a sexual proclivity previously unknown to his or her partner. Take for example Paul (Josh Lawson) and Maeve (Damon Herriman). They could not be more devoted to each other even though they never got around to     getting married. At the beginning of the film (spoiler alert of a very funny joke), Josh mishears Maeve after a recent sexual encounter, thinks that she is asking him to “rate” her. He complies with a very high score. Actually, she said she would like to be “raped” not “rated”. She goes on to try to deal with Josh’s consternation by explaining she has always had the fantasy to be raped by a man (who she would not know was actually Josh) but of course she would never want to have sex with anyone but Josh.

We allowed the spoiler to illustrate the subtle comedic elements that pervade this film as well as to introduce one of the sexual fetishes that is examined in this movie. The sophisticated among you may know that some variation of rape fantasies, perhaps being treated rough or even at the other extreme, are not uncommon.

So it goes, as we are introduced to other couples’ secret fetishes. One woman is very attracted to men who are very sad and cry, She is driven to try to bring about the state in her loving husband. You can find out the result of this as well as being introduced to the other couples and some of their secret fantasies as the film unfolds.

The film also brings up the not so unusual sexual situation for people who are deaf. We are introduced to this aspect of fetishes as a young deaf man Skypes a service which acts as an intermediary for deaf people who need to communicate with people of normal hearing. In this situation, the deaf young man attempts to use this service (which actually does exist) in order to call another service that provides phone sex. The intermediary is a young woman who must “sign”(communicate with her hands) to the young man and verbally convey his sexual wishes to the normal hearing phone sex lady on the other line. We will leave it to your imagination to picture the result of this situation, but like the rest of the film, it is also poignant, insightful and opens up an important part of life to the movie audience.

This film deserves the awards that it has already won at various film festivals and if it can get good distribution, should achieve wide play and perhaps establish a new movie genre. (2015)

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Dear Frankie – nf – This is one of those British films that takes about five minutes for us to get used to the accents and understand what they are saying. Although, it turns out that Frankie one of the main characters in the movie, a charming 9 or 10-year-old boy doesn’t say any words as he is deaf. We learn that this was the result of his father beating him as a small child. Mother and child along with grandmother have kept on the move in Scotland so father will never find them. Mother played by Emily Mortimer has a touching, loving, very close relationship with Frankie and has created a story for him that his father is away at sea. She secretly writes letters to him and intercepts her son’s outgoing mail so she really is also hearing his “voice” about his feeling and observations of life. Frankie although very bright in school is chided by his schoolmates. When the boat on which the father is supposed to be sailing is noted to be coming into port, the mother, who is quite lonely herself decides that she needs to present a man as Frankie’s father for him to briefly meet. She arranges for a stranger, sensitively played by Gerald Butler, to be the father for one day before he goes off to sea again. Needless to say, intertwined with lovely scenes of “father and son” and sometimes mother, especially at the stark but beautiful Scottish seaside, there are some complications. First time director Shona Auerbach has cast her characters very well and captured the emotional relationships between them. The story is somewhat drawn out and simplistic but the acting was excellent. (2004)