Nobody on the Fleshbot staff is married, so we don’t have any particularly juicy insights on the institution, but it sure seems like it’s a big deal: cohabitation, jointly-filed taxes, little rings that you freak out about losing, it’s all quite heavy. At least there’s always the wedding to look forward to. And adultery, too!
1. The Wedding Song: Let’s start with the film that’s a little more emotionally heavy. We’re in Tunis in 1942, and Muslim Nour (Olympe Borval) and Jewish Myriam (Lizzie Brochere) are teenagers who have been best friends since childhood; they live in the same building in a quiet neighborhood where their respective communities coexist in harmony. Each secretly wishes she had the other’s life, but besides that, life is peachy. Then, because this is 1942, the Nazis show up and ruin everything. German authorities prevent Nour’s fiance from getting a job, and so they must postpone their wedding. Meanwhile, Nazi tax policies prevent Myriam’s mother from working, and overcome by debt, she marries her daughter off to a rich doctor. Myriams dreams of true love are crushed, Nour finds herself agreeing with the Nazis’ anti-Semitic propaganda, yet through it all, the two friends hold on to each other because they’re all they have. So far, sounds pretty sexy, right? Yeah, well, you know how it is. It’s a beautiful story, and we’re big fans of Lizzie Brochere, and life being what it is, there’s some great nudity on display at 6:00, 46:30, 1:02:00, and 1:27:00.
2. Novo: And now for something lighter with fewer Nazis! “Novo” is the story of Graham, an office worker who suffers from serious amnesia–he loses his memories every few hours or so–and has to write everything down in a notebook to keep his head straight. This seems to be an especially big problem at work, where Graham’s boss (Nathalie Richard) frequently takes advantage of his memory loss and tricks him into sleeping with her. In addition, there’s a new temp named Irene (Anna Mouglalis) who gets involved in a relationship with Graham and writes her name on his chest to try and make him remember her–this part of the movie is a bit like a gender-swapped and more erotic version of “50 First Dates.” Thanks to the machinations of his boss, Graham loses his memory notebook and tries to track it down, and ends up asleep on the beach. There, he (re)meets his son, who tells him that his wife forgives him for, well, having sex with everybody because of his condition. Even though the story has a lot of extremely sad elements in it, it’s actually kind of an uplifting romance. Irene and Graham are really cute together, and as you can see from the clip above, they’re very creative in bed! Look for more of Anna Mouglalis at 17:00, 30:00, 33:00, 35:00, 42:00, and 46:00.
[At top: some advanced oral sex techniques, courtesy of "Novo" (movies.netflix.com)]
