by Rich Moreland, December 2016
SPOILER ALERT! The final resolution of Justine is right around the corner!
The installments of this five-part review are posted as a package but designed as stand alone essays, so you may read the ones you like and forgo the others.
All photos are courtesy of Pachamama/Decadent Films.
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Pachamama Films/Decadent Cinema combines erotic horror and soft core S&M action within a framework of classical literature, a rare adventure in movie making.
Dead But Dreaming’s vampire legends, Ollala (based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s vampire tale by the same name), and Barbazul (Charles Perrault’s “Bluebeard”) represent avant-garde indie film that offers timeless story telling infused with adult themes.
And don’t forget, Amy Hesketh’s performance art lures everyone into her cauldron of sexuality and pain that marks (pun intended) the excitement of these productions.
Amy’s talent is on full display again in Justine. Undoubtedly her interpretation of the suffering feminine is hard on her body and eventually she will decide enough is enough. So if watching Amy on-screen is your pleasure, be sure to get a copy of this film.
Having said that, Justine, sparks conversation in another way.
Following the footprint of the films mentioned above, Justine carries a political message steeped in images that are literary and mythological.
Let’s take a brief look at a few examples.
Three
First, the movie’s most dynamic image, the restrained and punished woman, surpasses other Jac Avila creations with the possible exception of Maleficarum.
Amy Hesketh, Mila Joya, and Beatriz Riveria are easy on the eyes and offer the visual delights of a good whipping that S&M aficionados appreciate.
But that’s for just for starters. There’s more.
Take the archetypal number three, the staple of myth and legend which accounts for its dominance in the Bible. Jac Avila follows Sade’s lead in exploring it.
The novel mentions twenty-one victims (three sevens) consumed in the prison fire. Adulthood is also age twenty-one, a hint that when Justine escapes from prison, she is old enough to take responsibility for her decision-making, or more specifically her inaction, in a theme that runs through Sade’s work.
Also, the dungeon candle stands have combinations of threes and sixes cleverly placed among the torture devices.
The Circle
Jac Avila focuses on three sacrificial victims to create his religious motif.
Each girl is bound to the wheel reminding the viewer that while a patriarchal God may oversee the world, women are the source of a never-ending circle of virtue and vice–reproduction on one hand and sexual temptation on the other–that drives the human condition.
Thus we have the wheel’s most important message. Civilization’s male-dominated hierarchies insist that female sexuality is not to be trusted, so women must be confined and chained rather than celebrated.
By the way, trust makes its appearance at the end of the film in an ironic twist. But you’ll have to watch the movie to see it.
Speaking of sacrifices, after Rosalie’s dungeon crucifixion her stigmata wounds are treated by Omphale and Justine in a scene reminiscent of the three women at Calvary (Golgotha) recounted in the gospels.
Then, of course, there’s Jac’s version of the three crosses we’ll see later.
The Sacred Feminine or Defiant Feminist?
White is the color of purity and the girls wear white loincloths depicting the partially clad martyr linked to the Medieval crucifixion image. Only Justine is nude.
In this modern interpretation of Sade’s novel, she is both virtue and vice, honoring the complete woman and validating her defiance of patriarchy despite her humiliation.
In other words, Justine is totally exposed, the literary “everywoman.”
When the abused girls retreat to their bed, the configuration of their bodies is a reminder of the Holy Trinity with the God/Daughter shift illustrated by Rosalie’s suffering.
The importance of the sacred feminine in Church lore cannot be easily dismissed.
However, this scene is part of a series of images that begins in the dungeon with the chained and collared Justine grabbing vainly for Rodin in a fit of vengeance. She is defiant and frustrated, the angry feminine, or in modern terms, feminist.
Then we see the Trinity motif just mentioned.
At first the girls are looking away from each other, individualized in their agony, emphasizing the misery and abandonment that is part of the human condition.
But they eventually join hands in spirit as well as in truth, an affirmation that the sacred feminine will prevail.
Imagistically, they form their own wheel with their overlapping hands on Justine’s hip as the hub.
Leonardo’s Perfection
It’s worth mentioning that Jac Avila’s woman on the wheel is a vague reference to Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man,” perhaps suggested by the filmmaker more unconsciously than deliberately.
Simply put, each girl represents the Renaissance thinker’s harmonic blend of art and science that ultimately spawned the Age of Enlightenment and, ironically, the Marquis de Sade.
In this film the female image emerges perfect in form while tormented with pain, as Justine reminds us with her harsh condemnation of Biblical tenets.
We can conclude then that Justine is a full-fledged challenge to the Church and its intrusion into the pre-theological State of Nature that Sade celebrates. Jac Avila has given us pause to reconsider Sade’s argument.
We have a broader question, of course, that is too much to consider here. Is the perfect female form and its corresponding consciousness a creation of Nature or God? Or both?
Cutting Across Time
The confrontation between female suffering and empowerment, the heart of this story, cuts across time.
Here are some of the examples.
In I Only See Darkness: Part Two of this review, we see twenty-first century vehicle tires abandoned on the side of the road, a comment on Justine’s situation.
Then there is Rodin’s modern bottle of beer in the dungeon scene, though bottled beer was known in Sade’s day. As the film comes to its denouement, Rodin wears sunglasses not available in the eighteenth century. Combine those images with a wife-beater shirt and the macho persona of the alpha male (God?) steps into view.
Also, we have the brass bed (a Victorian invention) that post-dates Sade. But it is appropriate here because the Victorians muted female sexuality, giving rise to Freudian theory on hysteria, repression, and sexual anxiety.
The costumes are eclectic. In the dungeon scenes, for instance, Rodin sports the aforementioned wife-beater shirt, a Hollywood staple reaching back to the 1930s.
Incidentally, Amy Hesketh cobbled the wardrobe together for the film . . . not a simple task.
Now we know why Jac Avila breaks the fourth wall repeatedly. His message transcends the here and now and goes well beyond the story at hand. What better way to reinforce the narrative’s timelessness than addressing the viewer directly, cutting through the limitations configured by the camera’s lens.
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So, that’s a quick run-down of some of the symbolism incorporated into the Justine narrative.
We’re set now to venture into our last installment for the dramatic conclusion Jac Avila has crafted for this version of the Sadean saga. He deviates from Sade somewhat but retains the flavor of the novel to its bitter end.
A reminder. If you don’t want to know how everything turns out, skip the next post!
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For the curious, Amy often crafts the torture instruments including racks, whips, and the like that appear in all Pachamama/Decadent Films.
Getting a feel for the whips is something BDSMers would understand.
By the way, in making Justine, testing the wheel was vitally important, as you might expect.
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Amy Hesketh can be reached on Facebook and followed on twitter. Jac Avila is also on twitter.
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