What to do about the Wachowskis? Lana and Andy started so strong and sexy with their lesbian grift noir Bound (1996) - which remains their best work -- and then captured the whole world's attention with the reality-bending sci-fi The Matrix (1999). The global success of that influential movie seemed to give them carte blanche and blank checks going forward and the freedom doesn't appear to have been good for them; the size of their ambitions and geektastic dumb/coolness of their concepts (like college students getting stoned and talking superheroes and theology all night long) is undermined every time by messy storytelling. That's so strange for filmmakers who started with such a tightly constructed narrative piece like Bound.
Daryl Hannah is the Octomom !!!
Tim will be reviewing Sense8 proper for us when he's finished with the first season but for now I want to talk about what I do love about this aggravatingly slow series and that is its radical sexuality. I've never seen the like in American mainstream film or television. NSFW business after the jump...
Tell me this is a joke.
No. sorry, Lito. This show takes its sexcapades very seriously.
Sense8 is built around eight characters in different cities who are connected in a psychic "cluster" to each other and able to psychically and physically and even mnemonically communicate (they seem to share flashbacks from a time before their connected "birth" -- Daryl Hannah is the Octomom!). Halfway through the series they haven't really vocalized the term "sensates" as an identifying label or superhero team name yet so what they are is derived entirely from the plot synopses that Netflix provides. I'm about 7 hours into the series and feel as if I'm 6 hours ahead of the characters and that is a huge problem is what I'm saying.
The Sensates: Wachowski repertory member and Asian film star Doona Bae (The Host, Air Doll) plays Sun the mistreated daughter of a very wealthy family in Seoul who happens to be super dangerous in a fight though she's the tiniest wisp of a thing with no visible muscle tone; Brian J Smith (Gossip Girl, Stargate Universe) plays good cop Will from Chicago where the sensates "mother" kills herself in the first few minutes of the pilot after "giving birth" to them and he's sucked immediately into the mystery due to his curiousity and investigative resources; supersexy Spaniard Miguel Ángel Silvestre (Almodóvar's I'm So Excited) plays Lito, a macho Mexican action star who is secretly a big homo; Moody German star Max Riemelt (so good in Free Fall - available for instant watch on Netflix) plays Wolfgang, an ambitious thief in Berlin; British actress Tuppence Middleton (probably best known as the flirt in The Imitation Game who provides their "Eureka!" moment) sports a convincing Icelandic accent as Riley, a DJ in trouble with drug dealers; British actor Aml Ameen (small roles in The Maze Runner, and Lee Daniels The Butler) plays Capheus, a bus driver in Nairobi who is only trying to care for his sick mother which gets him into a lot of hot water with powerful men; Tina Desai (from the Exotic Marigold movies) plays Kala, a religious Indian girl entering an arranged marriage to a wealthy businessman; and Jamie Clayton, a transgender American actress, plays a hacker named "Nomi" who is the first sensate to be targeted by the Big Bad shady organization that wants all eight of them dead and/or lobotomized.
But let's talk about the sex, the hot hot sex.
The very first sex scene in the show is a sweaty orgasmic and hot romp between two women. As it turns out one is trans and one is cis and they've been together a long time. The scene ends with the trans woman Nomi saying "you just fucked my brains out".
I didn't need to see this shot to punctuate it (though I laughed that the dildo was rainbow colored) but the show needed to show it I guess.
'Fair warning to binge-watchers,' it seems to be saying, 'we won't be pulling any punches.'
The most radical element of the series is surely its sly paradoxical thesis that sexuality, gender and identity are innate and steady and evolving and mutable. See, the sensates prove that the more "evolved" among us have no barriers when it comes to empathy and identification with those entirely unlike themselves (well except for their beauty but it's television what do you expect?). The scenes are shot multiple times and cross-cut so that we see these very different actors living out each other's experiences to show their psychic connections. As the series progresses this also effects the sex scenes.
We begin to see the straight characters experiencing pleasure from gay sex (and vice versa) as in this scene from Episode 6 (the raunchiest episode) wherein the cop is just innocently lifting weights and suddenly he's transported into a sexual situation with Lito, the closeted actor with the equally hot boyfriend.
And from there it only gets crazier as the sensates enter into a virtual orgy of a sorts in a bathhouse where Wolfgang swims and relaxes and occasionally picks up women to f***. The orgy seems to spring forth from Lito & Nomi's having sex with their significant others at the same time. Suddenly all the characters (well, most of them at least) are feeling it. So you get trans on cis action, lesbians with gays, gays with straights and so on. Everyone gets a happy ending... even the characters not directly involved who don't really know what hit them.
After everyone orgasms, Wolgang is on his own again.... just hanging out, completely unphased by the polysexual orgy he was just participating in.
And speaking of Wolfgang. One of his bathhouse visits coincides with Kala's wedding so he basically enters it dripping wet and naked. The camera and editing do that typical thing of hiding his business at every opportunity in a long scene until suddenly they don't, making the scene both in-your-face dramatic and weirdly comic.
No, YOU spent 40 minutes photoshopping together screenshots from a pan up..
Kala looks down at Wolfgang's junk and promptly faints, thereby stalling her actual nuptials. (Kala later even prays to her elephantine God about her German visitor with "the large trunk".)
So the series is blessed with not only sex positivity (the only negative byproduct of any of the sex scenes is a potential blackmail situation) but a very healthy sex drive which it indulges often. Though there are infrequent flashes of humor about the sex, it takes the act seriously. It's worth noting that the two serious relationships in the show are both homosexual relationships and are shown to be life-enriching, carnally-intense, and deeply-romantic. The gay and lesbian characters even view their sex as sacred as when Lito tells Nomi that taking his lover into his mouth for the first time was like holy communion.
It's all very radical for television, really.
If only the rest of the show weren't so messy and meandering and repetitive. I could probably talk about this show for hours but the storytelling is so slow and metered out (about exactly one truly important thing / reveal seems to happen every 52 minutes) that as befits its multiple-identity nature, binge-watching might not be the best way to do it. Instead place 12 screens in a circle around your room and press play on each episode simultaneously. The series will only last 60 minutes or so and it will undoubtedly give off the same global carnal silly serious spiritual dangerous ambitious wtf vibe with far less of a time commitment.
And it will make exactly as much sense.