50 Shades of Grey

I’ll take two approaches to 50 Shades of Grey.

(i) The story

Not having read the book, I can only describe the film as a feminist caricature of male dominance, in business, social conventions and especially sex. Here is male power extensio ad nauseum.  

Women embrace the story because it’s pure fantasy. Christian Grey (what a safe name for a guy who works in the ambiguous netherworld) is a dream lover. Played by a rippling underwear model, he’s a handsome single billionaire who runs a high powered network of investment, development and charity. He plays classical piano, flies and glides, is equally accomplished at literary references and jogging, has cars, closets and apartments to die for — and he’s not gay. The twist is that he’s not Cary Grant but a practitioner of the current trend, rough sex. His playroom does not come from Home Hardware. I think.

Anastasia Steele (i.e., a deposable princess with a hard core to resist his hardcore designs) literally falls for him when she first enters his office. She wants sex, love and romance, the latter two of which his life scars prevent him giving her. She is pretty, slender, a virgin, but is ultimately reluctant to accept the flogging and punishment his alternative to love-making requires. She will follow him into his world but wants the right to say when to stop. After submitting to so much, Anastasia eventually takes back her power.

Christian was originally seduced into being a submissive. There he discovered the joys of being controlled, freedom from having to make decisions or determine his will. Every tyrant would love to sell that bill of goods. Now he contends he will offer Anastasia that liberty, as if it wasn’t for primarily his satisfaction. He sets the firm terms of their relationship — in a legal contract, no less — that protects him from her desires, like their sleeping together, going out on dates or being affectionate. He will run the whole show. So like a guy, he still has the nerve to blame her for attracting, weakening and changing him. It is to laugh.

The film ends like the scene of their first meeting: the elevator closes separating them as they say each other’s name. Expect a sequel. Or two. Increasingly shadier if not Greyer.

(ii) The style

The film is directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson, who as Sam Taylor-Wood was one of the brilliant young visual artists in Britain. She won the most promising artist award at the 1997 Venice Biennale and placed second to Chris Offili for the 1998 Turner Prize. Her art photography background sets the film’s visual style: glossy shallow opulence. Her opening city is metallic grey. Scene after scene gleams like a Vogue layout. Everything is expensive, classy — and cold. So are the characters. Both leads’ mothers seem all plastic face, the adoptive fathers impotent jokers. 

Though bondage has for some time been a suggestive staple in the glossy fashion mags, there’s a piquant tension here between the flashy layouts and the flayed flesh beneath. To preserve an R rating (and box office), however, the sex scenes are still softcore, apparently a sellout from the extremities that gave the novel its sting. We see the Steele naughty bits a lot but nothing of the lower Grey front.  Don't expect the DVD to provide that selected short subject. Indeed the sex scenes are so tame the film can be charged with domesticating transgression.

     This work clearly grows out of Taylor-Wood’s previous films. Her 2002 commissioned portrait of David Beckham for the National Portrait Gallery was a film that watched the beautiful man sleeping. He was at once the subject of the film and the object of the world’s gaze — for once the woman’s gaze not just the male. Her Nowhere Boy (2008) examined the early years of the young, sensitive, abandoned lad who became John Lennon. Her Crying Men recorded a number of famous men crying, including Lawrence Fishbourne, Paul Newman, Sean Penn and Robin Williams, familiar men in an unfamiliar openness. Like into what that bully Anastasia is trying to convert our poor Christian, turning the cocksure into henpecked. It may take another two films to do that, but I'd bet she will. Unless Sam Taylor-Johnson is given free rein to be as daring in these films as she was in her art.