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This week, the Fridae Movie Club wishes all the best to outgoing
Singapore chief censor Amy Chua, who in spite of her cautious, conservative
slant, presided over a striking liberalisation of our censorship
system in the past five years — and this week's selection proves
our point.
Our pick of the week is House of Pleasures, a frank
and explicit, yet artistic look at what went on behind brothels in
Paris at the end of the 19th century. Featuring more nudity, female
solidarity, and kinky sex amidst suffering and squalor than even
a modern women-in-prison flick, the film is a spiritual companion
to Hou Hsiao Hsien's Flowers of Shanghai.
Twisted, gory, verbose, and over the top. The
Raven captures the
charm of American Gothic writer Edgar Allan Poe and his writings.
The writer, played by a very campy John Cusack impersonating Nicolas
Cage, is embroiled in a series of Se7en-style murders, all
inspired by his infamous short stories.
Japanese horror POV is a found footage horror film
about the haunting of two teen idols — who happen to be real-life
teen idols playing themselves. Written and directed by a Japanese
master of horror, the flick sneakily blends real life and fiction
on the level of say, Wes Craven's New Nightmare. Given
that these teen idols' fanbase consist of pre-teen girls, we applaud
the censorship board for scaring the living daylights out of them.
Till next week,
Vernon Chan
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House of Pleasures
House of Pleasures is an elegy to an age and way of life
long gone. It's also a film that would be hard to appreciate
in its totality without first seeing Hou Hsiao Hsien's Flowers
of Shanghai. Made in 1998, Hou's classic depicted life in
the flower houses of Shanghai at the turn of the 20th century.
In House of Pleasures, the action is set within a similarly
respectable Parisian establishment in 1899 and 1900. Besieged
by increasing rents, the spread of venereal disease, the advent
of the Metro, and modern science (and its approach to humanity
and human relations), the girls of the Apollonide ask the same
question of their clients while knowing full well the impossibility
of being bought out of their debts and contracts.
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