The 52: Room in Rome
From June 2023 to June 2024 I'll be watching a lgbtqia+ film each week and coming back here with my thoughts, feelings and plenty of hopes we aren't met with the "kill your gays" trope. I call this The 52.
TWs for child loss and sexual assult of a child.
Loving strangers, loving straners, loving straininnnnerssssahahahah—
When this song opened the film, and “strangers” quickly evolved into “strainers”, I thought it would be memorable.
The song goes on to play TWO MORE TIMES. Maybe three. And I never want to hear it again.
Actually, I think I’d like to have all memory of this film wiped from my mind. Suffice to say I wasn’t a fan (but this is a review so suffice to say my suffice will actually continue extendedly, protractedly and sufficiently).
I watched a really brilliant youtube essay at the beginning of this year that spoke about the female gaze, and focused on how some lgbtqia+ films, specifically lesbian films, aren’t for the lesbians. They’re for the men fetishising them.
I’d be adding A Room in Rome to the top of that list.
I don’t think I’ve ever watched anything that was so obviously made for men who think women making out are hot. Like, there was no… substance, nothing beyond two women who spent around 10 minutes of this nearly TWO HOUR FILM wearing clothes and the rest fully starkers. Like, the filming for this would have been rough, surely there were some sore nipples afterwards. Chilblains, it’s all I’m saying.
It was also… less a film with a story than, and this is very harsh but also true: porn with substance. But it really was lacking on the substance. We'd have a few minutes of slightly awkward conversation, some anecdotes that were probably lies, some reference to the paintings that filled the hotel room, and then SEX SEX MORE SEX, and I really agree with the people who say the director/writer seemed to have a narrow view of how women having sex can work. It was pretty uninspired.
I did think it was interesting (I won’t say clever) that the whole thing was set in a hotel room, but the fact both of these people are contentedly cheating on their partners (one who is grieving a lost child and the other who getting is planning to get married in a week but also had a relationship with two students, his fiancee Natasha and HER TWIN) makes me appreciate that less.
And… these characters are just odd. We have Natasha, a twin who flicks back and forth between pretending she the twin who was molested by her father and the twin who was… jealous and aroused by that, a statement that should not have had a sex scene anywhere near it, and then we have Alba, who ~has turned women more than once~ and has a gross habit of being pushy and demanding around sexual intimacy. She wants this to happen, thus OBVIOUSLY Natasha wants it to happen, and even if she’s resistant it’s just because she hasn’t seen the ways of the lesbian before.
It’s just weird and bad and not good. That's my feelings on the whole thing. Weird, bad and not good. And a whole lot of bruising because these women decided to spin around like a washing machine on spin cycle in a bathtub for no reason.
Also, “want a threesome” had to make an appearance. How can it be a film where two women have sex that's written for the male gaze if it DIDN’T have that in there somewhere.
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