As a subtitled film, this fell to the bottom of my watch list, and as a film with no US distribution, finding a copy of it to watch wasn’t a fun endeavor, but if you do get the opportunity, try to give this one a go. I do suggest skipping the US version, as nearly a quarter of the film is cut out due to the “extreme” pornographic material shown throughout the film, but honestly the original version was all that titillating or difficult to watch. In fact, the sexual acts were much less objectionable than the third act’s “parent / teacher” meeting in which all the community members were judging here for her actions with her own husband, accusing her of being a whore, harlot, slut, communist, capitalist, pedophile, or just a ‘bad influence’ on the kids she was teaching in school. I find no problems with the video she shot with her husband, and I’m pretty sure that if the same thing happened in the US that the same kind of manufactured puritanical outrage would be expressed, but it’s still terrifying to think that she would be treated as the offender when she’s actually the victim of several crimes, the least of which is the theft of her video.
On a side note, this film was made entirely outside of the US, but nearly every scene features something that either physically came from the US or a concept like a covid mask that says “I can’t breath” that originated from culturally from my country. It’s both interesting and disturbing to see how deeply our ideas and situations are embedded into the global zeitgeist.
