A tour through our favorite films on human perversions as rapresented by cinema.
Scripted, directed and edited by Japanese cyberpunk director Shinya Tsukamoto in 2002, A Snake of June is a complex and obsessively penetrating film. It conveys Tsukamoto’s reflections on the relationship between illness and self-acceptance, portraying cinema as a voyeurism that by violating individual intimacy can lead to a self-discovery path.
The film is shot in a black and white shaded blue, that is, the color representing hydrangeas and water, the iconic elements of the author.
Rinko is married to a much older man, and the sexual passion is now buried under years of habits. The couple eats separately, sleeps far, barely talks, spends their lives in two solitudes that do not embrace. They work and their lives are little more than that. Rinko is a counselor for a support phone, she knows how to help others, but is unable to help herself. Everything changes when a mysterious photographer breaks into their lives blackmailing the woman with pictures of her masturbating and dragging the husband into a perverse game. Then, a journey of self-awareness starts and anonymous places of the city turn into terrifying scenarios where the fears and insecurities of Rinko take shape.
A Snake of June offers an epic reflection on cinema and the human condition. Between flash, rain, cancer, vibrators, hydrangeal seas, and an invisible snake awakening in the body of the protagonist, the film is a poetry in which the dawn of the senses arises in the images shown and in the hidden ones. A necessary film, pure and sensual as the rain.
What if a small, seemingly quiet town in the province concealed a secret reality made of violence, sex, and perversion? It is based on this question that David Lynch built his fourth film in 1986, Blue Velvet, a real triumph of voyeurism.
The title comes from Bobby Vinton’s song, performed in the film by Isabella Rossellini in the nightclub Slow Club. The film tells the story of young student Jeffrey Beaumont, who personally investigates a macabre discovery in a nearby home camp, before finding that in the quiet town of Lumberton there is an underground world of violence, frightening facts, sex, drug trafficking and corrupt police.
The world of Blue Velvet is immersed in fear and obscurity, where darkness dominates and envelops every element by placing everything in mystery, in threat, in death.
Lynch gives the spectator a deeply fragmented view, as in the scene in which Jeffrey’s hiding in a closet and looks at Dorothy, forced to meet Frank’s sexual perversions.
The protagonist is indeed portrayed as a child clashing for the first time with the uncertainties of sexuality and although Jeffrey is mostly a sympathetic character, his reasons remain morally ambiguous.
Resuming Sandy’s words, we do not really know if the guy is “a detective or a pervert.”
Almost like a general test for Twin Peaks and the investigating between the fences and sheets of a sleepy American province, Blue Velvet reveals with a psychoanalytic method, the sordid and violent face of an idyll.
Intruded with symbologies, in Blue Velvet tension is not given by the suspense of interlacing, but by the sadistic violence of certain scenes. In perspective, Blue Velvet appears, therefore, as a preparatory work, to the fruitful Lynch filmography of the following years.
