FIFTY SHADES OF GREY (Sam Taylor-Johnson, 2015) **1/2

Rating: 6/10 (23 February 2015)

Last Friday's theatrical screening of the long-awaited film adaptation of the literary phenomenon that gave rise to the dubious "Mommy Porn" subgenre was decidedly the noisiest one I have ever attended: females (who, unsurprisingly, made up the vast majority of the audience) gabbing relentlessly to each other throughout, women talking directly to the screen, another who gagged on her popcorn and a chubby girl who commented out loud that she would not allow anyone to whip her like thatas if any one would ever care to or she would even feel the pain?! I was only vaguely familiar with the novel until mid-2012 when it became a daily topic of conversation among female colleagues at my workplace! Eventually, curiosity got the better of me and I downloaded a .pdf edition of the trilogy (I would not dream of spending money to acquire them legitimately!); the low level of writing on the first book (especially) was even more off-putting than any of its would-be objectionable content turned out to be...but I soldiered on and read through the first and second novel – even if by the time the film version came along three years later, I am still stuck in the initial stages of the third book! Anyhow, learning that several of those same female colleagues had decided to attend a screening of the film and make a "Girls' Night" out of the event, I cluelessly decided to join their party uninvited...
The millions of fans of the novels worldwide immediately had their own ideas regarding who would be ideal casting for the central roles of disturbed billionaire Christian Grey and plain ingénue Anastasia Steele...but, in the end, these fell into the laps of Irish model-turned-actor Jamie Dornan (handsome, sure – but even more wooden than any of the instruments of pain/pleasure at his disposal in the infamous "Red Room of Pain") and the admittedly beguiling Dakota Johnson (the daughter of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith, no less); tellingly enough, the latter was invited to present at yesterday's Oscar ceremony but Dornan was not. Nepotism, perhaps (after all, the film was similarly breaking box office records worldwide)...but I do not think so. From the rest of the cast, only two names rang a bell for me, incidentally both saddled with the thankless roles of the parents of each respective protagonist, namely Oscar winner Marcia Gay Harden and Jennifer Ehle. I do not recall if it was like that in the first book as well but I was surprised to see that the major secondary character of "Mrs. Robinson" was only whispered about a couple of times but never actually appeared. Indeed, some people seemed surprised by the abrupt ending expecting the film to be a reductive adaptation of the trilogy...as if Hollywood would ever lose an opportunity to take two more trips to this goldmine in the coming years!
While I found nothing all that salacious about the book's copious erotic passages myself (I have been an avid reader of Georges Bataille's novels from 75 years previously after all!), the film's even blander depiction of them is disappointingly tame...so much so that the rumours I had heard that the sex scenes where going to be filmed in silhouette and the fact that it has actually been banned outright in several backward-thinking territories are totally laughable in retrospect. Johnson's small "mammalian protuberances" (to steal a phrase from the late great Frank Zappa) get the most mileage but Dornan is not averse to filling up with screen with the occasional close-up of his bare bottom ("a perfect 10" according to the most adulatory among my female friends – who, nevertheless, also took time out to spot a couple of goofs that escaped me and google a difficult word)! But, then, there are no glimpses of blood at all in the film or, come to that, pubic hair during its 15 minutes of sexual content overall!! Needless to say, this was more of a studio marketing ploy to keep the film from being slapped with a forbidding NC-17 rating rather than a case of artistic cold feet on the film-makers' part. Still, as it is, director Sam Taylor-Johnson will remain most notorious in years to come for having married an actor 23 years her junior (Aaron Johnson, of KICKASS fame) than for having helmed the steamy film version of FIFTY SHADES OF GREY!! What with the film hurrying through the narrative and skimping on the juiciest parts...but, thankfully, Christian's irritating habit of tilting his head and Anastasia's cringe-inducing and somersaulting "conscience" have been jettisoned!!
It is all the more a pity, therefore, that one learns how director Johnson counts The Velvet Underground's 1967 counter-culture classic debut as one of her favourite albums since what is on display in her own film is worlds apart from the full-blooded BDSM relationship depicted in the shattering "Venus In Furs", the song which made me fall in love with this all-time favourite band of mine in the first place! Equally fitting would have been The Stooges' "I Wanna Be Your Dog" from their own John Cale-produced 1969 debut (incidentally, I got to see Cale live at a London concert in October 2012)...but, at least, we do get The Rolling Stones' 1978 hit "Beast of Burden" on the eclectic soundtrack that also features classical pieces and contemporary pop stuff. Just as the literary works did not really break new ground (it just slyly appealed to the lowest common denominator and hit the collective jackpot..or is that G-spot?!), so the film follows in the wake of much older (and much better) films that had tackled the controversial theme of BDSM far more liberally and artistically, among them Mario Bava's THE WHIP AND THE BODY (1963), (my own No. 1 film-maker) Luis Bunuel's BELLE DE JOUR (1967), Henri-Georges Clouzot LA PRISONNIERE (1968), Yasuzo Masumura's BLIND BEAST (1969), Radley Metzger's THE IMAGE (1975), Walerian Borowczyk's LOVE RITES (1988), Roman Polanski's BITTER MOON (1992), etc.!