Through The Looking Glass (1976)


Viewed September 14 2019
Directed by Jonas Middleton
*****

 Ever since I watched it a few nights ago, I can't stop thinking about Jonas Middleton's masterpiece of erotic cinema Through The Looking Glass. But even that categorisation seems overly simplistic because this is a weird porn film because all of it's (still very explicit) sex scenes are deliberately, almost perversely unappealing. Having a horror score (by Arlon Ober and Harry Manfredini of Friday The 13th fame) certainly helps but it's more in the performances.

 The sexual bacchanalia and free for all of the garden party scenes brings to mind Pasolini's trilogy of life but it's all too much, so far beyond limits that it more closely resembles Sweet Movie or Pink Flamingos. Deliberately unerotic. The same goes for the famous sequence where a camera goes inside Catherine's vagina. It's not sexy, just invasive, gross and disturbing.

 As Catherine recalls being sexually abused by her father, she blames herself and we begin to realise all the weird disturbing sexual stuff is deliberately off putting, demonstrating the way in which sexual trauma makes standard sexual activity impossible.

 That scene is nothing compared to the climax where Catherine enters a kind of sexual hell. Here, one's entire being becomes about sex, desperation and release. There is no pleasure, you become dehumanized, simply sexual organs in constant heat without pleasure. Who knew that a porn film had cinema's most disturbing vision of hell? Such are the contradictions of Through The Looking Glass, more In The Realm Of The Senses and Salo than Pornhub. Unsung masterpiece.

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