topless women

TOPLESS WOMEN TALK ABOUT THEIR LIVES

Reviewed by Mike Crowl

It's normal at the end of a movie for the audience to get up and leave as soon as the credits start rolling. At the end of Topless Women , however, the audience I was in sat silent, as though stunned at the bleak lives of the six characters in this story. Yet this movie is often very funny, with down-to-earth characters who mostly display a good deal of warmth and likeability. But they're also people who have been released from restraint, in whom Self reigns, and who only become passionate when their own little worlds are affected.

There is more tragedy underlying this piece than in the overrated The Piano. The people here are our contemporaries, not distanced from us by a century, seen in a vivid picture of a society that has slid downhill into paganism. I don't know whether writer/director, Harry Sinclair, intended to show us this, but to me the message came across loud and clear.

How much does an artist reflect his society and how much does he influence it? Sinclair here seems at first merely to be reflecting it, but the movie is more subtle than that. There is no overt moral tone, yet he constantly forces our innate sense of justice to the surface, particularly in the later stages, when most of the characters betray each other, and the only character to have grown into any stage of love is the most betrayed.

It's hard to recommend this as a movie Christians should go and see. Apart from the "topless women" themselves, there is some nudity and a great deal of obscenity - much of it in your face, as the saying goes. (The "topless women" of the title appear briefly in a send-up of a foreign movie rightly regarded by the characters as absurd.)

Yet the shock effect of the movie is perhaps something Christians need to experience. Many of us are cloistered from the kinds of lives that are considered normal by the characters in this movie, and we're happy to be entrenched in our ghettos. The movie reveals the huge moral, spiritual and cultural gulf that exists between Christians and other people. If you go to this movie, there are certainly things that will upset you - and they won't all be in the area of carnality.

If you go to this movie with non-Christian friends, you'll have plenty to discuss in terms of "what is life all about?" And if you go to this movie, you'll appreciate that the people who twenty years ago thought the outrageous behaviour in Goodbye Pork Pie was a trumpet call for freedom may well be the very ones sitting appalled at the realisation of where that freedom has taken them.

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