aka Singapore sling: O anthropos pou agapise ena ptoma
This movie is a mindfuck. When a movie can be vile, disgusting, disturbing and beautiful at the same time, you know you're watching something special. Throw in, 'well made' and you're aces!
SINGAPORE SLING comes from the mind of Greek director, Nikos Nikolaidis. I've never heard of him or any of his other films. All I knew about SINGAPORE SLING was it was released by Synapse Films and well--they put out kick ass movies. I had read some reviews, mostly bad, about people's hate for the movie –or their sheer love for it. I love watching movies that people either hate with all their heart or love like a child. Obviously it's a movie that stirs up emotion, good or bad. I love a movie that 1) makes you think and/or 2) makes you feel…something, be it sadness, happiness, hate, love, melancholy, terror, whatever. If a director can achieve that, he's done a good job as far as I'm concerned.
Before I dive into the movie, let me say this---SINGAPORE SLING is a very hard film to review, based on the absolute strangeness of the film and it's very unconventional plot. I will try my best though.
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The first thing we see in the movie (in stunning black & white) are 2 women digging a hole on a very rainy evening. Dressed in rain coats, goggles and frilly lingerie, it becomes apparent that they're digging a grave. Nearby a man crawls through the wet drive way. He is wounded (possibly shot?) and crawls into an unlocked car to get out of the rain and rest. All the while he's narrating (in French) in a very 1940's detective-film-noir kind of way. In fact the whole film looks like an old dark noir film on acid (and maybe some other drugs too).
The women carry a body to the hole (his guts spill out when he slips from their grasp) and bury the man, whom they are calling "the butler". He's not fully dead and pulls at one of the women's legs. A shovel to the skull puts an end to him. After that, the women go back into their lush mansion, and then the film goes in a direction I wasn't expecting. The women (an incestuous Mother and Daughter) talk to the camera, documentary style—but there are no cameras. Who are they talking to? This is part of the whole mindfuck aspect of the movie I was talking about.
The Daughter goes on to tell us about her sadist of a Father (he took her virginity at age 11 and she recalls it glowingly) who died some years back and how life has been hard since he's been gone. The women have tried to replace him with various male 'servants' that they end up killing. You get the feeling that this just might be one of the sickest families to ever grace the silver screen. Oh but that's just the beginning. She goes on to tell how she and her Mother play these "games". One game being, the Daughter becomes this "character" named Laura and goes out and lives a normal life. The Mother and Daughter reenact a "scene" where Laura comes to the house for a job interview and the Mother makes her give head to her strap on. Now you might be saying, this sounds like porn, but it is in no way porn. Everything is shot in a way that a lot is left to the imagination--just another part of the mindfuck.
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The Frenchman from the beginning comes to the door and passes out and the Daughter attempts to help(!?) him, well, she dry humps him anyways. It becomes clear that the Daughter and to a lesser degree the Mother are insatiable nymphomaniacs. The Daughter has, at first, what seems like a nervous tick, but soon you realize she's having little orgasms. I mean, she can literally climax from a stiff wind. The Mother stops the dry hump session and they dig through the Frenchman's pockets. They discover he's a detective, looking for "Laura" who fell of the face of the Earth and who he's also fell in love with. They find a notebook in his pocket that has (among other things) a recipe for a Singapore Sling, so the women call him Singapore Sling through the rest of the film. He's completely out of it (assumed from blood loss?) and the women carry him to a bed and tie him up.
Soon he is forced into sex with the women, given shock treatment (which basically zombiefies him), and forced to endure the various grotesque acts of these two loony bitches, including being a part of their "games". A very disgusting scene (that had even me gagging) shows the Daughter on top of Singapore Sling, screwing him and she gags herself with her fingers and vomits on his face. All while he lays there, lifeless but conscious. Why does she do it? To be cruel? No, it's almost as if it was a natural thing to do. The years of sexual abuse, by her parents as a child, has created quite a sexually disturbed young woman.
The movie never lets up and becomes stranger and stranger until its bizarre ending. I literally watched the movie stunned and mouth agape. Though the things I described about the story seem vile, it is shot in such a way, that the beauty of the film tames some of the subject matter. Also, the black & white helps as well. If the film had been in color, I don't think I could have stomached it. There is a ghastly dinner scene that if it had been in color, I may have barfed. The film is in English, French and Greek, but mostly English. There is an issue with the subtitles that some may find distracting. Seems the original subs for the film were all fucked up, so Synapse redid them—but in order to correct them, the subs are in a grey box that covers the old subs. So a grey box covers up a quarter of the screen when the subs are on. Kind of crappy, but like I said, the film is mostly in English.
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There are only 3 actors in the whole film, and they all do great jobs. Meredyth Herold is the stand out, and she plays the role with just the right amount of over-the-topness. The score is as beautiful as the look of the film and is mostly made up of classical music. Nikolaidis does a tremendous job in the director's chair given the subject matter of the film. He put a lot of love into the movie and it shows.
****SPOILERS…Kind of****
After the movie, I was left with a feeling of, what did I just watch? The whole mindfuck thing that I mentioned, stems from, never knowing where the film is going. Why are they talking to the camera? Is the whole movie just another game? Seeing as though the killings are never shown, you may ask, did anybody really die? Are they acting out this sick fantasy? Maybe Singapore Sling 'is' the Dad! What the hell is going on? Who am I? I'm cold and the wolves are after me.
****END OF SPOILERS****
Anyways, the movie left me more disturbed than I already am. Like I said before, there's no way I could fully describe this film, but seeing is believing. While it's not the best movie I've ever seen, it's something special to say the least. Some will hate it, and I mean HATE it, some will think its dumb, and others will marvel at it. In case you only glanced through the review, I fall in with the last group.
SINGAPORE SLING trailer