Guilty Pleasures: Red Shoe Diary

I admit it: I fast-forwarded through all the sex scenes.

The plot of Red Shoe Diary is not very complex, to put it mildly. Disturbed girl lives with nice rich and talented guy. She has affair with only slightly-less-nice poor-but-proud blue-collar guy. They are both crazy in love with her. She is crazy in love with both of them. Unable to resolve the situation, girl kills herself. Heart-broken nice guy she lived with finds her diary, reads it, finds out about the affair, confronts the blue-collar boyfriend and gets beaten up, and becomes even more post-modern than he already was. (His domicile is a loft in some sort of old industrial building that however has a bar, an indoor basketball court and a luxurious bathroom complete with antique-style tub just perfect for either having sex in or slashing ones wrists with a straight-razor in. And what a view.) Everyone in this movie is very good-looking and seems to have a lot of money. There is a fair amount of artily-lit, gymnastic-looking sex. The end.

This is not to say that Red Shoe Diary was a bad movie. For what was basically a piece of soft-core porn the acting was very good. The rather dreadfully pretentious narration by the unhappy heroine, consisting of her diary entries, could possibly be the sort of stuff a disturbed, insecure, and not very talented young woman would write. I am not too sure that the director of the movie (one Zalman King) does not think such stuff the height of poetry, and the nice guy's character's dismay as he reads a particularly purple section of prose is meant to be only directed towards the act so described, not the way it was described. (Let's just say the word "jackhammer" was involved and leave it at that.)

I am not sure what audience this movie (or any movie of this sort) is aimed at. It is a typical three-hanky weeper with extra sex, so one would think that it is aimed primarily at women. But the only person we get to see almost entirely naked is the girl. I've seen more of David Duchovny's flesh on network TV in the X-Files. But there is not enough sex to attract the average porn-watching guy. So it perforce must be a "chick-flick." It's certainly not aimed at gay men, despite a peculiar scene between the two boyfriends in a confrontational pick-up game of basketball. The only explanation I can come up with is that people who make these types of "erotic" movies consider male nudity to be less attractive to women than the thought of themselves with the perfect bodies of the heroines in these movies; they're supposed to identify with the girl and see themselves as the ones receiving the romance-'n'-sex treatment. The men are no more than idealized lovers with GQ bodies. There is nothing less "ideal" or romantic than the sight of a penis. These movies are commercials for a Hallmark version of erotica that wants nothing to do with the actual mechanics of sex, just the surface of words and artfully-removed clothing. This is not necessarily a bad thing unless one is the sort of person who expects life to be just like the movies. But there is no hope for that sort of person, except for the hope that one day, when the reality two-by-four smacks them in the head, they will not be too badly injured.

I actually liked the movie, though as I said I fast-forwarded through the sex-scenes. I did that not out of a sense of prudence but for one reason that I will come to and also because quite frankly I am not into looking at naked girls' behinds, and if I wanted to look at perky breasts, well, I've got a mirror. (Now I wouldn't have minded seeing a little more of Mr. Duchovny, but then I'm a sad case when it comes to said actor.) I could have done without the young-lovers-gambolling-in-the-fields flashbacks, and some other scenes that were even too self-consciously "film-like" for this art-attack. The dialogue where it was not voice-over from Alex's diary, was not too painfully bad, except towards the end, but that was more voice-over. It's probably impossible to make voice-over narration sound unpretentious in any type of film. The characters were sympathetically treated so that one actually cared what happened to them. Even the part of the girl Alex's harridan mother (played by Brenda Vaccaro) was allowed to become sympathetic at the end. Even the peripheral characters had moments that kept them from being throwaway parts, such as the part of one of Alex's grief-stricken friends. David Duchovny (Jake, the nice guy boyfriend) played his part believably, getting across just the right amount of confusion, pain, and anger. The only time I did not believe entirely in his character was at the very end, when he is putting the oh-so-postmodern and ironic ad in the paper, but that was a just an opening for the Red Shoe Diaries series that was on Showtime (I think). Billy Wirth, as the other boyfriend, has less to offer, but then he is playing a slightly avant-garde Hollywood screenwriter's idea of a simple, working-class guy, and there isn't much even a better actor could do with such a part.

Bridgette Bako, in the role of the suicidal heroine, looks much too young for the part, despite her mature body. Even though she is supposed to be playing a very young, childlike woman (for instance, though they live in Los Angeles, she does not know how to drive), I don't think she is supposed to be a teenager. After all, she does seem to have a successful interior design business of her own. She does the suffering and insecurity part of her role well, but in the erotic scenes she just looks like a child playing dress-up in an older woman's clothes (or lack of them). That is the other reason I fast-forwarded through the sex scenes: it was disturbing to see someone who looks so underage having at it with two men who seemed so much older than she. I hope Mr. King did not consciously set out to make the woman not just be childlike but look like jailbait, and thus make the two men look like pedophiles instead of romantic heroes.

Copywrite 2001, A.H.

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