2/27/2024 0 Comments Secretary movie![]() But its funniest moments have very serious underpinnings: There are times when "Secretary" is difficult to watch, simply because it's never easy to watch a character in emotional pain. "Secretary" - which was adapted, with significant changes, from a terrific short story by Mary Gaitskill - is also extremely funny in places, as the truest movies about sex must always be. How comfortable you feel with that is completely up to you. It's a liberating, kindhearted picture, one whose ending brings with it the feeling that something has finally been shaken free. But both of those words suggest a kind of deliberate prurience that the movie just doesn't have. "Secretary" has already been referred to as "pornographic" and "disturbing" by some critics. That Shainberg does ultimately make sense of them (as much sense as we can reasonably demand of the human heart and the other organs that spring to attention at its merest whim) will probably rattle some people. Steven Shainberg's strange and wonderful "Secretary" spells out the letters and more, but not in an orderly, comfortable way - it's more as if he were spilling them like dice out of a cup, as a kind of jarring reassurance that they're not going to immediately make sense to us. What we do have is a whole lot of people rolling around in artfully mussed beds, sheets arranged to cover their privates just so - a hurried, embarrassed shorthand stroke for something whose letters we don't dare to spell out. There are plenty of trembling, anxious watchdogs of the culture who have been claiming for years that there's too much sex in American movies, when the reality is that there is hardly any at all. But sex - which, you could argue, is the source of life's most damnably confounding mysteries - is still the final frontier. When it comes to movies that explore the vast mysteries of life, we've all been well trained to accept the most banal life-force crapola about love, death and family relationships. But how many are going to line up to see a movie about spanking? Or, more specifically, how many are even going to realize that they ought to? All good humanists profess to love movies that cast light on the subtlest angles of human experience.
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