Charlie (Harrison Gilbertson) is a lonely and sheltered 16-year-old boy on the Gold Coast reeling from the recent discovery of his father committing suicide. While then trying to find outlets to ease his grief, he meets Maggie (Emmanuelle Beart), a French housewife who just also happens to be, albeit secretly, a BDSM dominatrix. After landing work with her as a pool boy (nothing cliched about that, huh?), Charlie soon has the hots for Maggie and becomes a willing participant in her private sexual games. Meanwhile, his life outside Maggie's house is almost as dramatic but much less interesting to him.
Look, admittedly what grabbed my attention about this 2014 Aussie erotic drama was the sexual content but even with that, I found My Mistress increasingly insipid and even tame. I can only liken it to a piece of chewing gum: initially it's absolutely delicious, but from a lack of variety its flavour runs out after about 20 minutes. The BDSM scenes are discreetly handled but I just got the sense director and co-writer Stephen Lance either deliberately or was forced to water them down to avoid the movie getting an R rating, and the rest of the narrative they're in I found seriously dull and hackneyed. The lack of a music soundtrack compounded this, and there's no sense of romanticism or lushness in the cinematography either.
Beart, one of the icons of modern French cinema, seems to enjoy spicing her screen image up here as a publicly conservative yet privately wild housewife, and Gilbertson keeps the sweet innocence to a pleasant minimum, but their efforts only make somewhat of a difference. For me, My Mistress is an underwhelming and timid telling of a narrative that could've been tactful, daring and brilliant. 6/10.
Look, admittedly what grabbed my attention about this 2014 Aussie erotic drama was the sexual content but even with that, I found My Mistress increasingly insipid and even tame. I can only liken it to a piece of chewing gum: initially it's absolutely delicious, but from a lack of variety its flavour runs out after about 20 minutes. The BDSM scenes are discreetly handled but I just got the sense director and co-writer Stephen Lance either deliberately or was forced to water them down to avoid the movie getting an R rating, and the rest of the narrative they're in I found seriously dull and hackneyed. The lack of a music soundtrack compounded this, and there's no sense of romanticism or lushness in the cinematography either.
Beart, one of the icons of modern French cinema, seems to enjoy spicing her screen image up here as a publicly conservative yet privately wild housewife, and Gilbertson keeps the sweet innocence to a pleasant minimum, but their efforts only make somewhat of a difference. For me, My Mistress is an underwhelming and timid telling of a narrative that could've been tactful, daring and brilliant. 6/10.
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