SALON KITTY

(i’ve recently come across this movie after watching ‘caligula’ after a very long time again. its impact was so strong that i just had to write down some thoughts about it …

an edited version highlighting its socio / cultural polemics has been published august 2008 by FLUX magazine …)

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SALON KITTY – a movie review

A freak of a movie. Five stars!

This is a serious movie. Very serious. Quite sad in a way that it somehow seems to have ended up in a ‘porn’ pigeonhole, or even in the so funnily called ‘exploitation’ niche. Hm, this could be because the nerve it hits reverberates really quite deep in our collective psyche, with its dark, shocking cocktail of power and sexuality, that people could quite easily feel intimidated, even ashamed of themselves, for possibly opening up to it – perhaps even liking it – and they therefore have to resort to scapegoating it instead (at least in public). Another reason for its strange ‘underratedness’ could be its stark political impact, its shrill post-68 outcry of anger against a continuously repressive social environment, which might have been simply ‘too much’ for many political corners and therefore reason enough to suppress it.

In any case, for those who haven’t seen it, briefly the plot: In 1936 Berlin, the Nazis have the splendid idea to set up a high-class brothel in order to spy on its clients and gather all sorts of embarrassing behind-the-scenes information about them. The idea involves to use not professional hookers and train them in ‘intelligence’ but instead scout for girls throughout the whole country who display an unshakeable faith in national socialist ideology – and then train them in both, servicing sex and sucking off vital political clues. So far all of this actually happened. Brass then wrote a story of ‘true love’ in between where one of the girls falls for a German pilot and he also really falls for her too but he’s subsequently being destroyed by the Nazis after he openly tells his lover (room bugged, she doesn’t even know herself, although supposed to be an ‘agent’) about his decision to surrender to truth instead of killing another bunch of people for a mere political lie. This is all centred around the strangely elevated power freak Wallenberg who’s in charge of setting up the whole ploy. Within his underlying, secret belief not in ideology at all but purely in power he also feels he can find love through blackmail and sexual enslavement. In the end, as it is usually the case with power, the sword has always got two sides and it is only a matter of time until it eventually turns against him.

CRAFT:

The screenplay is consistent and extremely original. There are so many ideas which allow for watching the film over and over again. The seamless interweaving of cabaret songs, seedy boudoirs, Nazi stuff, true love and ‘fucked-up’, explicit sex scenes is absolutely priceless. As a director, Brass’ psychological insights and attention to emotional details are quite staggering and I feel not many in cinema can claim to see equally far (or deep for that matter. Perhaps someone like Todd Solondz with Happiness for instance or Julia Davis with her powerful British comedy series Human Remains and Nighty Night I & II). With Salon Kitty Tinto Brass unfolds an eerie tale of messed-up and messing-up people, stuck in their manmade human tragedies, as they play along ‘games’ related to power in a world of belief, hatred and fear. The naked human, whether physical or psychological, is the canvas upon which the wickedness and perversion of the political agenda unfolds.

Brass gathered astounding talent for this project. For the costumes he hired the hugely talented swiss designer Jost Jakob fresh from college and Ken Adam (of Stanley Kubrick and James Bond fame, in fact a native German who got away from his country before the war started) created some outstanding, fairly personal work here. Lavish Berlin war time interiors and frighteningly slick Nazi architecture, somewhat reminiscent of many of a present day multinational’s corporate identity (only with a red, black and white swastika as the well lit, stylish logo on the bottom right hand corner). Ingrid Thulin (Ingmar Bergman, Luchino Visconti) plays a prime-leaugue-acting Madame Kitty as the charming and charismatic quasi-show-host-thread through the whole film. Helmut Berger (Again Visconti) in the role of the Untersturmbandfuehrer Helmut Wallenberg delivers a brilliant performance too. Cast for his ‘ambiguity’ according to Brass, his cold, detached beauty hiding the monster inside is so convincing, the movie wouldn’t be what it is without him. Kind of American Psycho, but Nazi style. Also the total out-of-it-ness and therefore the perfect requirement for high ranking officials of any whatsoever perverted system is being equally well portrayed by John Steiner as Wallenberg’s boss Biondo. Like in his somehow similar role of Longinus in Caligula he unleashes the whole reality of why fucked-up systems are humanly possible in the first place. Through emotional detachment in the face of however outrageous atrocities and through complete obedience to the rules and rulers of the game, preferably with the right sense of dry, cynical humour. Both his creations, intrinsically linked to Steiner’s distinct features and facial expressions, stay imprinted in the audience’s mind for a very long time. But last and not least, with Teresa Ann Savoy as Margherita, the shared female lead, one extremely rare thing happens on screen. Primal sexual charisma which doesn’t need to rely on ‘pretty pretty’, silicone, or other whimsical, silly seduction routines to elicit female eroticism (like for instance many American directors would almost force their characters into displaying). With all her natural sensuality, a mere human being of the female kind so to speak, with not quite straight teeth and a delicate, innocent quirkiness, only Maria Schneider’s acting of Jeanne in Last Tango in Paris (a movie which was also ‘too much’ for its time but luckily lacks any outright political messages mixed into the whole sex thing and could therefore be resurrected from a similar ‘rubbish’, ‘freak sex’ corner) can somewhat match such a performance. No matter how much Margherita is being abused or reduced to a mere object, whether in fancy clothes or stark naked, she always retains her dignity, sovereignty and beauty intact. I find this absolutely remarkable and – yeah, sexy too.

CONTENT:

For me personally, the most interesting aspect of Salon Kitty is its description of how sex can be ‘institutionalised’ so bloody easily in order to meet any whatsoever surreal political ends. If it hasn’t already been before, in a movie like this it becomes perfectly clear again that romantic / sexual love is the ultimate system-subversive trait of us humans and has therefore to be carefully kept in check. Sex / love can be ‘allowed’ or ’sanctioned’ only within a particular framework for fucking which repressive political (slash religious) systems hand down to its people. Of course, love in itself is such a deep instinct that it always has to be promised as the incentive to carry on with our lives somewhere down the line. Like winning the lottery it is the dream come true for those who’re really ‘lucky’ in life, whilst in reality it hasn’t got much to do with luck at all, but mainly emotional health, confidence and maturity. But even health and maturity, in a screwed up, viciously grinding away system, does not guarantee fulfilment of such an actually modest emotional need. You could easily end up instead on a meat hook, like Margherita’s lover did, because your jealous comrades scapegoat you for their own political and therefore personal failure. Or literally as a hooker, if you erratically attempt to escape the world of your brainwashed parents like Margherita ‘instictively’ tried to. Since whether you do what they tell you or just the mere opposite doesn’t really matter in terms of the psycho-mechanic laws of destiny.

The scene where the women are being lined up in the huge Nazi gym, saluting naked with Heil Hitlers, before the equally naked SS guys are marched in to test their feasibility for providing uninhibited sexual favours, while the ‘authorities’ play some demented propaganda tunes on the grand Steinway, is easily one of the most startling I’ve ever seen. It is being closely followed by another one (censored for most of the movie’s history) where some of the girls undergo further testing in sterile, kafkaesque prison cells, having to please all sorts of ‘real’ freaks in order to show their blind determination to the political cause. Considering the difficulty to get such rather ambitious scenes across, it has to be said there is a certain sense of subtle but very effective humour in Brass’s style, paired up with his frankly astonishing emotional sensitivity. Another interesting directorial feature is that the more ’sexually explicit’ scenes become, the more politically they are being insinuated at the same time. This is a very fascinating formal idea and skilfully done indeed. Or the use of mirrors throughout the whole film. Apparently following a personal obsession, Brass acquired the necessary tricks from Ken Adam to never have any camera visible throughout any whatsoever complicated shot, making him a “maestro of mirrors”, as he describes it himself in his self-ironic voice. As a narrative element, in Salon Kitty this serves extremely well to scatter each character into various aspects and angles. It also alleges that given the right amount of oppression and terror, every single one of us could find themselves reflected in those mirrors like any one of the characters who are trapped in the storyline of this utterly political movie. Sometimes, having been born into a ‘liberate’ climate the impact of blatant political force is quite easy to forget. And yet, even today, in a way we still ARE trapped in a world of sexual / emotional abuse – and that is exactly the deep nerve this movie is hitting. Only that today, instead of ‘concentration camps’, ‘national socialism / communism / dictatorship’ and ‘brainwashing / propaganda’, the abuse is being masqueraded as ‘broken homes’, ‘capitalism / consumerism’ (if I want to be really provocative) or one of the many other contemporary ways of ‘abuse / prostitution’ (for economic, corporate, personal, political, intellectual – or even religious ’causes’).

But of course, the most underlying angle of Salon Kitty (as it is also the case with Caligula according to Brass) is how power in the end always corrupts people, why power is so attractive to already corrupted people in the first place and above all, why it is so incredibly sad for power freaks having to resort to killing, breaking and raping in order to create the illusion that they are being loved by someone (or even by many, haha) – although they deep down bloody well know that this is not at all the case. Obviously there is a strong element of power involved in any form of sexual attraction – taken, being taken et cetera – but the separation between sex and love, in other words the assertion of power to achieve intimacy with another person, is psychologically an irresolvable dilemma. Perversion, or better, more Freudian, ‘deterioration from core humanity’ (for when it comes to sex itself, according to Brass, there is no such thing as perversion) is without a doubt the ugliest manifestation of our tragic human condition. Its mechanics compel that anything healthy and innocent must be defiled and destroyed in order to keep the dream / madness alive, feed it with ever more blood and despair.

Perhaps therefore the movie for its time ‘did go too far’ and this is the reason, why after all his hassle with trying to make Caligula work, Brass left any political message completely aside in his later work, almost overnight, in order to put his attention entirely on sex itself with the production of real, honest ‘erotica’ in which he purposefully avoids “using sex as a metaphor for something else”. For such a talented person as Brass this must have been quite a radical step to take. But in another way also probably quite a reasonable one. Sexuality has just been repressed for too long throughout our history and keeping this repression alive is what provides some of the strongest hooks for any system built mainly on ‘power’. What is therefore needed more than anything else before ‘real’ political awareness can happen is plain simply sexual / emotional healing. And this is exactly what Tinto Brass’ later work offers. The permission to explore sexual / emotional self-expression for those of us who’re stuck in kind of boring or otherwise ‘institutionalised’ love lives. Once we are free to open up fully to the right person, without getting hurt or abused or otherwise ‘fucked’, we can still dig out another movie milestone from some dusty archive, Michelangelo Antonioni’s incredible Zabriskie Point (which is, interestingly enough for such an important movie, very difficult to get hold of at the time of writing) and proceed with matters of personal political responsibility from there.

Reinhard Schleining
London, 23rd March 2008

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