Treats the male body and sexuality as if they're normal

jm10701

The best thing about this movie is its extremely casual treatment of sex and male nudity - casual even for a European movie, and I've seen lots of them - just as if the male body and human sexuality were normal, natural and an integral part of everyday life.

Oh, wait... THEY ARE!! So what makes this movie remarkable is that it treats something that is about as natural as anything can be as if it really IS natural!

Isn't this a crazy world? that such a simple, straightforward concept can be still so controversial more than 30 years later that we have people expressing their horror and outrage in online reviews of this movie? It's amazing.

As if no man in real life ever gets an erection; as if no woman ever idly plays with a man's penis as if it were a flower; as if young straight men never compare the size of their penises. ALL of that happens in real life, but in a movie? HA! It should, but it doesn't.

So the way the male body and sex are treated in this movie is much more extraordinary and refreshing than it ought to be. Otherwise, this movie is okay but a little tiresome.

The focus on motorcycle racing is tedious. The acting is okay but not great (the movie's only two experienced actors - Jeroen Krabbé and Rutger Hauer - overact to such a clownish extent that it's embarrassing; but maybe that's just how Dutch actors are taught to act, because the novices are a lot more realistic).

The story is not particularly engaging and not at all believable (particularly one character's violent coming-out). And the woman who drives all the men crazy looks to me like a Cabbage Patch Kid with WAY too much makeup on - not sexy *AT ALL* - but then I'm gay, so I'm often dumbfounded by what turns straight men on.

score /10

jm10701 15 March 2012

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2581518/