The Blowfish Blog

Broken

So, I just watched Broken, starring Sasha Grey, directed by Dave Navarro, with a script — and it really is a script — by Navarro and Sancho. The phrase that comes to mind is, “This is fucked up, right here.” There’s some incredibly over-the-top weirdness at play. For instance: Sasha Grey takes a cumshot in her mouth, then goes into a bathroom, spits the come into a spoon, cooks it, fills a syringe with it, and injects it into her arm (offscreen, but we see her tie off her arm with a rubber cord, so it’s not really left to the imagination). During Sasha’s intense scene with Mark Davis, there are Italian subtitles . . . for no obvious reason. The next sex scene has Jenna Haze and Tommy Gunn in a hackneyed porn set-up: he’s the pizza guy, she’s the girl who wants to pay for pizza with poontang. But most of the non-sex action is on fast-forward, with sped-up voices, and soon we discover this is just one scene of many being shot on a porn movie set. (Yeah, it’s all pretty meta.)

Pretty soon we’re dipping in and out of those other scenes, and it’s like watching a porno that’s come unstuck in time. It’s some seriously non-linear narrative . . . except it’s not particularly narrative, being mostly just fucking. 45 minutes of fucking! Eventually performers amble over into one another’s scenes, and they’re not just breaking the fourth wall — it’s like they’re breaking the floors and the ceiling, too. Ultimately it’s an orgy, sort of, with wandering cameramen and sound guys occasionally appearing, going about their business. It’s hot . . . and hard to follow . . . and sometimes a little annoying. But it’s not boring, lazy, or ordinary. You get more fast-forward moments, random intervals of black-and-white and even photo-negative shots, and a pervasive sense of strangeness. It’s awesome and exhausting.

The next scene is kind of relaxing, by contrast — Audrey Biton and Marco get together backstage, fucking on and around a director’s chair, and there are some very spankable moments. The weirdest thing here is Audrey licking some come off a mirror, and really, in this flick, that hardly rates a mention.

Finally we get Sasha coming home to Mark Davis, ambushing him with a shotgun (no subtitles this time!), making him kneel, strip, put a condom on the gun, and bend over. What happens next is . . . well, I’d honestly hate to give it away. Let’s just say the meta-qualities of the film continue, and the ending is both shocking and completely justified by what came before. (And also, just maybe, transforms those Italian subtitles from a bit of pointless weirdness into a hint.) This is an ambitious movie, though I couldn’t tell you whether or not it entirely succeeds . . . that would require me knowing what the creators were trying to accomplish! An argument for the dehumanizing power of porn? A cautionary tale about the kind of broken personalities that sometimes gravitate toward the adult film business? A simple character study of a rather disturbed mind in an often-disturbing business? A case could be made for all those, and more. Regardless of what it means, it’s worth watching.

• Broken

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, 23 April 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Videos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.