Sex and the pity

The team entraps a cast of unwary sexual adventurers. By Annalee Newitz

Taxicab Confessions

IT'S PRACTICALLY A tradition in American movies about sex: include explicit, taboo images of carnality while at the same time confirming the most conservative myths about the horrors of deviating from strict heterosexual monogamy. It's what I call the Fatal Attraction effect. If there's hot fornication in the kitchen sink, there's going to be a seriously nasty punishment afterward. Eyes Wide Shut, Center of the World, and Chasing Amy are more recent entries in this subgenre, and they're joined by a new documentary, Sex with Strangers. Directed by Joe and Harry Gantz (auteurs of HBO's well-regarded series Taxicab Confessions), it's precisely the kind of erotic movie that can titillate and castigate in one fell swoop.

Allegedly an evenhanded look at "swingers" culture, Sex with Strangers is disappointing on all fronts: incoherent and hateful, the film offers weirdly asynchronous glimpses into the sex lives of three couples whose nonmonogamous relationships are neither good examples of swinging nor even decent examples of relationships. The recent documentary The Lifestyle offered a more realistic portrait of swingers, who are by and large a rather staid, comfortably married bunch. Sex with Strangers plunges us into a creepy, dysfunctional world of manipulative men and neurotic women whose willingness to bare their bodies and emotions to the cameras initially is a kind of pleasant shock but later becomes shockingly repulsive. While the Gantz team's Taxicab Confessions offered bizarre but sympathetic glimpses into people's private lives, Sex with Strangers is a classic exploitation documentary, complete with naive, exhibitionistic subjects who clearly don't understand the implications of sharing so much.

Portland-dwelling indie rock boy Calvin is perhaps the most despicable person in the film, and thus it seems fitting that he's its narrative center. When we first meet him, he's in a long-term open relationship with Sarah, who cherishes her connection with him for reasons we find increasingly incomprehensible as we watch him blame her for his own callous selfishness and berate her for holding him back from "freedom." This freedom, apparently, is his new girlfriend Julie, whose main attraction appears to be that she's slightly skinnier than Sarah. Calvin eventually proposes to Julie and then explains to a heartbroken Sarah that "it's purely for financial reasons." Sure, the whole thing is luridly compelling as an example of a completely fucked-up relationship. The problem is that Sex with Strangers wants us to believe that this is in some sense the inevitable outcome of any relationship that deviates from the monogamous norm.

Meanwhile, a Southern couple named Shannon and Gerard confess to Shannon's mother that they're swingers in a scene so truncated one wonders if all three of them have read one of those "five seconds to a new you" books and taken it to heart. Gerard, like Calvin, is manipulative and cruel. When Shannon tells him she's uncomfortable with how much time he's spending on his online relationship with another woman, he reminds her that she's mentally unstable and asks if she's taking her pills. Later he explains that his philosophy is "thinking about me first." Shot in and around Shannon and Gerard's trailer-park home, this segment of the film seems intended to remind us that poor people get that way because they're slutty and insane and talk real dumb.

No doubt unintentionally, the Gantz team does manage to capture one healthy, functional couple who communicate openly with each other and don't lie or manipulate to get what they want. James and Theresa are a Portland-area couple who like to take their motor home on the road, park outside bars, and invite enticing-looking couples in for "some Jägermeister and sex." Boppy and optimistic, James and Theresa are genuinely happy and seem committed both to each other and to a sexually open lifestyle.

And yet Sex with Strangers keeps trying to make James and Theresa into monsters. Their comments are clearly edited to make them sound predatory and redneck: James describes meeting Theresa and thinking, "I'm gonna marry your ass"; Theresa talks about the thrill of the hunt for sexy couples to play with. Despite appearing in this abysmally antisex flick, James and Theresa do manage to convey their love for each other – and how fun sex with strangers can be if you're respectful and honest about it.

Although Sex with Strangers advertises itself as a voyeuristic trip into the world of forbidden sex, it's more like dysfunctional-relationship porn. The only thrill here for an audience is hearing unbelievable gossip about the train-wrecked lives of acquaintances we aren't given a chance to care about.

'Sex with Strangers' opens Fri/22 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, page 84, for show times.