Review by Adam Stephen Kelly
Stars Miriam Mayet, Matthias Faust,
Lana Cooper, Laura Tonke, Arno Frisch, Moritz Ross | Written by Rolf Peter Kahl
UK Certification 18 | UK RRP £15.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 75 minutes | Directed by Rolf Peter Kahl
Running only 68 minutes up to the credits, and mercifully I might add, Bedways is a pretentious and explicit film from Germany that will prove soulless and exceptionally boring to even the most die-hard members of the arthouse crowd. Those who think they can deduce something along the lines of The Seventh Seal from reading a bag of sugar will be met only with a brick wall when it comes to a viewing of this film.
This seemingly experimental atrocity revolves around a female director rehearsing with two actors of both genders in a dilapidated Berlin apartment. Despite a rather thick script, she has no idea where the movie is going and seems only to care about going over the very real sex scenes. But the lines between reality and the fiction of the film-within-a-film become blurred as the intimate relationships of the trio are explored behind closed doors.
The DVD cover features the quote “Only Lars von Trier has been more explicit lately.” Is that because he decided to open the similarly languid Antichrist with a scene featuring legitimate intercourse between two pornstars and followed it with all kinds of blood-soaked nonsense and substandard prosthetics, all in the name of 'art'? If you say so, Zitty.
The tawdry Bedways is essentially porn with legs. Very unattractive, near plot-less and wise-to-be-avoided legs. It closely resembles a particularly sour slice of French New Wave cinema but with a German twist, and one that's even worse than Baise Moi, with exception to the camerawork (yes, it has decent cinematography going for it). At least that had a coherent storyline.
EXTRAS ★ Just the trailer.