Last night I suffered through agonizing leg-muscle torture during the Cannes Film Festival’s opening night screening, Pierre Salvadori‘s The Electric Kiss (La Vénus electrique). Over the closing credits we’re treated to a re-listen of Shocking Blue’s “Venus“…this should tell you a lot.
This isn’t an allusion to the quality of Salvadori’s lightweight dramedy (which isn’t “bad”, just forced and insubstantial). It’s a statement of simple fact. I arrived a bit late to the screening due to working on my Rex Reed obit, and was therefore obliged to sit in the half-filled balcony. I was scrunched between two women, and the leg pain began about 45 minutes into the show. I decided to man up and suffer my way through the whole thing, and I made it! 122 minutes!
Set in 1928 Paris, The Electric Kiss is basically an emotionally earnest, low-key farce — an unrequited, “oh what a tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive” hetero romance in the usual farcical ways.
What got me, a high-octane hetero in decline, is the fact that Kiss doesn’t offer even the briefest anatomical glimpses or depictions — no sweat-glistened boobs, no fleeting ass shots, no simulations of this or that sex act. It’s kind of striking that while there are no bare breasts to contemplate, Salvadori is careful during one moment to offer a clean silhouette of a female nipple…alluring, old-school, almost Lubitsch-like discretion.
It is universally required that in any hetero dramedy dealing with the pain and ecstasy of romantic longing, the female lead must stir erotic desire among (or more precisely within) dudes like myself. The unfortunate fact is that Anaïs Demoustier, who plays a hustling, opportunistic carnival performer named Suzanne, simply doesn’t cut it in this respect. I’m sorry but that’s the truth of it.
What is The Electric Kiss about? The three Ds — desire, deception, discovery.
In a spring of 1997 edition of The Paris Review (issue #142), David Mamet explains “the trick of dramaturgy” as follows: “The main question in drama…is always ‘what does the protagonist want?’ That’s what drama is. It comes down to that. It’s not about theme, it’s not about ideas, it’s not about setting, but what the protagonist wants. What gives rise to the drama, what is the precipitating event, and how, at the end of the play, do we see that event culminated? Do we see the protagonist’s wishes fulfilled or absolutely frustrated? That’s the structure of drama. You break it down into three acts.”
And that’s fine, but I’ve long believed that the most affecting kind of drama (or comedy even) is one in which the main protagonist wants something and then somewhere during Act Two discovers that he/she actually wants something else. Something that is less a thing of mood or sexuality or a longing for wealth or advancement and more of a tender, deeper, more emotional longing. A personal growth thang, falling in love, doing the right moral thing, etc.
A character who stays with the same desire all the way through a play or a film is not, in my view, an interesting one. We don’t want to see the protagonist’s wishes “fulfilled or absolutely frustrated,” as Mamet says. We want to see those wishes evolve and thereby reveal something unexpected.
Which is why I’ve frequently noted my preference for stories that are built and structured upon the three Ds.
Here‘s an excerpt from Howard Suber‘s brilliant Some Like It Hot commentary track . It partly explains how this basic scheme of all great comedies applies during the finale.