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Singapore Sling

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Soukesian:
I finally got around to watching The Zero Years. Wow. It's not as stylish or immediately overwhelming as Singapore Sling, but it's at least as odd, Michele Valley reappears, and it contains many of the same elements: a few characters in a constrained environment, violent women, men in bondage, blood, vomit . . and all rather well acted with an underlying tone of seriousness.

Three women have been sterilized, imprisoned and forced to work as dominatrixes in an S&M brothel run by a sinister bureaucratic (possibly governmental) organization. They are joined by a fourth, with only a few months to serve. Everyone is going slowly mad, and is kept drugged to the eyeballs, so it's not entirely clear if some of the stranger events are really happening. Despite all of this, it's mostly a character study, with the sensational elements taking second place to the interplay between the women.

Technically, the film looks pretty good, and the subtitles are reasonable, though the translator seems to be struggling a little at times. From the notes at the website, Nikolaidis seems to have been quite insistent that this wasn't to be taken as a piece of post-apocalytic SF: "It would be a mistake to interpret this as a futuristic story. No matter how harsh it may appear this movie is about the shape of things that are already here and established . ."

As I say, not as immediately culty as Singapore Sling, but clearly the work of a filmmaker like no other. I definitely want to know more about the director and see more of his films.

tommygun69:
I got this on DVD a while back and was pretty dissapointed. It seemed to be trying way to hard to be shocking and crazy.

Soukesian:
Well, Singapore Sling certainly isn't everyone's tipple, and I respect your opinion, but I cannot agree. It's an incredibly beautiful film to look at, and the performances are magnificent, to the point that the shocking elements become part of the camp drama, and the impact they would have if presented in a verite fashion is taken to quite another place. There are plenty of exercises in pure shock horror discussed in this forum, but I think there's a lot more than that going on in this film.

Singapore Sling was a late work by a director who started out making avant-garde movies in the immediate aftermath of a brutal military dictatorship in the seventies, and achieved a number of counter-cultural hits in that context. By 1990, he didn't have much to prove, and the fact that this film is a deranged and meticulous tribute to Preminger's Laura suggests that Nikolaidis had a far weirder and more personal agenda than pure shock value. (Not that I would ever, ever say that there's anything wrong with that.) This is the work of a mature director who wants to represent what the movies, and one movie in particular, meant to him, and who really, really doesn't care if you don't like it.

This review, from the ever-fabulous Tenebrous Kate, persuaded me to purchase the DVD, and I very much agree with her take:

http://tenebrouskate.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/singapore-sling-1990.html

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