Sam Taylor-Johnson’s adaptation of the EL James erotica goes big on the red tape and very, very small on our hero’s legendary member, with results so awful they’re more Victoria Wood than Victoria’s Secrets
“Idon’t make love. I fuck. Hard.” With these bold but very misleading words we are introduced to what is the most purely tasteful and softcore depiction of sadomasochism in cinema history. It is also surely the most intensely anticipated literary adaptation since The Da Vinci Code. Millions of fans have already enjoyed EL James’s erotic bestseller on their discreet e-readers. Now there is a film version written by Kelly Marcel and directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson and cinemas can perhaps introduce special “Kindle” screenings before which the poster in the foyer is covered with a brown paper bag.
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In the murky history of sexual deviancy and perversions in literature and cinema we have had Venus In Furs and The Story Of O; we have had Oshima’s Ai No Korîda and Shainberg’s Secretary. James’s original book started out as fan-fiction triggered by the sexy vampires of Twilight. But 30 minutes into Fifty Shades of Grey I realised what the real inspiration for the film is: Victoria Wood’s famously dark and disturbing song about the transgressive ecstasy of turning off Gardener’s Question Time in expectation of being bent over your hostess trolley, and beaten on the bottom with a Woman’s Weekly.
Fifty Shades of Grey – video review Guardian
Except that in Fifty Shades of Grey it is more like being bent over a Jasper Conran pine-effect table and having your bum smacked with a copy of Condé Nast Traveller while the Nespresso capsules go all over the floor. This is a movie about submitting to erotic chastisement by a handsome man who plays Chopin on his grand piano and sips chardonnay from long-stemmed glassware. He is extremely rich. Because there’s nothing sexy about spanking if he’s skint.
Fifty Shades Of Grey
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But rest assured – it’s not just about spanking. Before the pervery commences, our hero lowers his trousers and undergarments and in a more conventional sense does to the female lead what Ms James did to the book trade and what Taylor-Johnson does to your chances of seeing an actual penis. Seriously – there are no glimpses of a penis in this film, not in any state. It’s primly off-camera. Or maybe the smoulderingly sado-obsessed hero does not have a penis. It could account for his tastes. And his decor.
Watch the trailer Guardian
Dakota Johnson (daughter of Melanie Griffiths and granddaughter of Tippi Hedren) plays Anastasia, the pretty, shy, klutzy student who finds herself interviewing a local billionaire for the college paper. This is the icily well-dressed Christian Grey, played by Jamie Dornan (he was the sexy serial killer in the BBC drama The Fall – casting to which the script playfully alludes).
Anastasia’s interview does not elicit any information about what Grey’s firm does – and this remains a mystery. But he is very taken by Anastasia, who in the time-honoured Mills & Boon style of demure secretaries with tempestuous plutocrats and nurses with hot-tempered brain-surgeons, is strangely unafraid of him. Anastasia tells him she is studying English literature and he asks if she was inspired by Charlotte Brontë, Thomas Hardy or Jane Austen. She earnestly replies Hardy and Christian smirkingly says he would have guessed Austen. (I personally would have guessed Brontë, as Mr Rochester is Christian’s generic ancestor.)
At any rate, Christian is soon sending our Anastasia a first edition of Tess of the D’Urbervilles – and shows up in the hardware store where she has a part-time job, to buy rope and cable-ties. Soon they are dating, but Christian frowningly tells Anastasia she must submit to regular sessions in his “Red Room of Pleasure”, tied up and beaten, sub to his dom. Biting her lip, Anastasia agrees, after a lengthy contractual discussion about what is and is not allowed: anal and vaginal fisting are not on, and neither are genital clamps. Neither, apparently, is having a penis. But ropes are OK. He also takes her up in his helicopter. And then his glider. Going up in his hot air balloon and then the Ford Anglia he bought from Harry Potter is presumably in the next movie.
