Directed Directed by Rolf Peter Kahl. Starring Miriam Mayet, Matthias Faust, Lana Cooper. Drama, Germany, 78 mins, 18 Cert.

UK DVD release date 21st March 2011.

Trying to balance between exploiting the idea of sex and total chaos, BEDWAYS proves that using an independent film industry to shoot porn is a poor excuse.

The young director, Nina, takes on an extremely vague project. She wants to say something, make an artistic comment but she doesn’t really know what about and why. As she invites a pair of actors to explore this vagueness with her, she waits to see a goal to it all form itself while shooting sex scenes. She seems to be obsessed about the topic. When asked by her potential producer to reinvent the movie without the sex scenes Nina answers ‘Never’. According to her understanding, you cannot talk about existence (or rather about a hint of something indescribable) without filming this physical act. As a director she isn’t even interested in who her characters are, she just wants to reduce them to the level of physical intercourse and through that lens observe and understand. She also tries to establish whether such an act can be indeed played by an actor or if it becomes a real thing when you create a genuine sexual tension in order to make it look plausible on screen. She insists on the actors to actually make love rather than study the emotions and feelings that accompany such relationship, but learns nothing about the nature of humans or life itself. Later on we witness Nina masturbate herself (one shot, she starts, she finishes, phew!) but whether she did it to prove that a good actor can play anything or to demonstrate that intimacy on screen can never be faked or that intimacy divested of discretion becomes an animalistic observation – to me remains unknown. It seems that Nina’s unclear motivation mirrors Rolf Peter Kahl’s (BEDWAYS’s director) uncertainty as to what he actually wanted to say.

BEDWAYS is deprived of consistent narration; the film is admittedly divided into seven parts evoking the seven days of creation, but such construction doesn’t seem to strive towards creating any kind of conclusion. The characters are truly random because even when the film is finished it is very hard to establish what were the relationships between them. Also the shooting isn’t brilliant. The cinematographer lingers on certain shots without the success of achieving a sense of deeper meaning or creating the moment to reflect. Nothing like Antonioni. The film is framed with two very similar scenes taking place in a black room with a TV and a camera, apparently the only place where the authentic lovemaking can be achieved. It doesn’t represent closeness and honesty of sex at its core but remains the only somewhat coherent postmodern statement of the film.

If BEDWAYS was meant to say something very important about sex’s perception by an individual or the society or artist’s entanglement in understanding the world through camera and storytelling – either I didn’t get it or the film simply failed the convey any of it. I’m afraid it’s the latter.

Bogna Jezowska.

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