Movie review – “Café Flesh” (1982) **

The golden age of porn officially ended with the boom in VHS but this was a late attempt to do something decent with the genre. It is a fascinating porn film, with its provactive premise – in the future only 1% of the population can have sex so the others go to clubs and watch. The male lead is one of the 99% and it sends him bonkers – he spends the film worried about his girlfriend getting serviced by this stud, and she gets serviced by him and… that’s it. (There is a section of erotica about men who watch better lovers have their way with their women – it’s painful to watch here). There are some porn standbys: a woman who secretly wants it, a farm girl virgin who turns out she loves sex and a masturbation scene, but none of it is erotic. Most of it is filmed in on take long shot, no close ups or shots of people groaning, with cuts to the dopey expressions of the watchers (it is slightly reminiscent of the sex in A Clockwork Orange). When it’s not filmed like that it is done sort of like a New Romantic video with nudity – cutting between different tableu shots. The sex scene at the end isn’t bad, but even the impact of that is limited through repetitive use of shots. Lots of potentially intriguing themes, like a women who keeps secret her negative status so as to keep her boyfriend, and the government forcing positives to perform sex, none of which are really developed.