Fifty Shades of Grey

”What are butt plugs?” I haven't read the book and I don’t know what the sequel is about, nor am I an expert on female sexuality. Therefore, please take this review only as the comments of a lay observer who would, however, give this film a two-star rating regardless of what he has or has not learned from it. ___ Fifty Shades of Grey exposes the rules of traditional romantic dramas and pushes them to the extreme with an anticlimactic story of the awakening of a naïve romantic who discovers, in addition to her own identity, the male-dominated world of market capitalism (“Welcome to my world”). With his cold-blooded business approach and acquisitiveness, Grey is the perfect prototype of a man as capitalist, convinced of his own superiority. He understands relationships as business transactions, prior to which it is necessary to negotiate the most favourable conditions (“I don’t do romance”). He buys and Ana sells, both literally and figuratively. He showers a woman with expensive gifts and “fucks her hard”, in exchange for which she humbly submits to him. He manages to convince her that freedom is gained through giving up responsibility. If a woman does not respect his rules, she will be punished. At the same time, the scenes with his domineering mother and memories of his relationship with his partner, who has subjugated him, indicate that Grey’s need for eroticised domination stems from his fear of women or rather loss of control over what makes him a man according to the current social order. ___ In her inexperience, Ana guilelessly accepts the rules of a world in which male pleasure takes priority over all else, in which a feeling of humiliation is determinative for the woman, in which the man is active (not only in sex) and the woman is passive. She does not know any other rules and for the purposes of the wonderfully straightforward narrative with black-and-white characters, it is not even desirable that she would know them. For Ana, the opportunity to submit to a man is a privilege for which she rewards the man in question by preparing breakfast (the way in which Ana takes on her role as a homemaker, as if it’s a matter of course, can also be perceived as the fulfilment of a male fantasy). It is only gradually, as she goes down the S&M rabbit hole, that she discovers who she really is (through sexuality, among other things) and begins to understand that being a woman does not mean being a tool for others, sharing everything (including a sandwich prepared for dinner) and becoming invisible. She slowly brings her own rules into Grey’s world along with her own ways of getting pleasure (“It's you that’s changing me”). ___ Despite that, the relationship remains unfulfilled according to the principles of melodrama. Peculiarly, the reason that he and she do not end up happily in each other’s arms is the knowledge of what the man really desires and what it means to be a woman. Fulfilling Grey’s fantasies – and thus playing the role that he requires from her – does not give Ana satisfaction. I would therefore like to believe that the blandness of the relatively tame and too brief erotic scenes (with music that kills any excitement) was the filmmaker’s intention. The film is at its sexiest when the characters only talk about sex and the story remains in the realm of the unrealised fantasies of the female protagonist, who thus controls the narrative and has the man under her power for at least a moment (the conversation over the contract). Conversely, Ana loses all of her power during the erotic games played out according to Grey’s fantasies. From a certain perspective, the empty-seeming ending and the lack of physical eroticism (in terms of both duration and explicitness) are not a mistake, but an attempt to undermine the androcentric vision and understanding of the world as it is represented by dozens of other romantic films about invisible women and dominant men (to go even further beyond the limits of valid interpretation, the discontinuity of the editing and the jumps during the scene involving Ana’s first sexual encounter could also be read as an expression of  her personal “paradigmatic break”). 50% (02/08/2017) (less) (more)