Will sexy Cosi fan tutte be too hot to handle?
Every so often, I get asked: what’s the worst film I’ve ever seen? That’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer, although Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel is high on the list.
A staggering work fuelled by flatulence jokes and slapstick, it is also includes pop culture references to Silence of the Lambs and Taxi Driver, which seem more dated than inappropriate for a kids’ film.
yet I didn’t actively hate Alvin, because its awfulness eventually became funny. One major difference between a PG film about singing gerbils and a Pixar film – the Toy Story series will never have a scene in which a cuddly character goes pole dancing.
However, I have no difficulty nominating my most uncomfortable film experience: a press screening of a film called Dangerous Beauty, where a successful venetian courtesan (played by Jacqueline Bisset) schools a protégé in the tricks of the trade by taking her on a detailed guided tour of a naked young man.
Out in the darkness of the fleapit, I was less happy. I was also not alone. Unaware of the content of the film, I’d invited my dad along to the preview. I hadn’t heard much about the movie, except that it was a period picture. My father is a history buff and loves movies too; what could possibly go wrong?
We sat in painful silence while Miss Bisset pointed out useful topography. Then, finally, my father whispered: ‘I don’t think all this is entirely historically accurate.’ reputation for misogyny. My first reaction was that this production must have excellent publicists.
An axiom of culture – known to any teenager who bought A Clockwork Orange on DvD, or ploughed through DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover – is that serious art portrayed as controversial is never as outrageous as it’s cracked up to be. But you only find that out after you’ve paid your money.
Usually any affront is gauged not by regular standards of affront but by the normal standards of art. Last year there were long discussions about a film version of Fifty Shades of Grey, and whether it would whip up audiences to a state of moral tumult. But at the public screening in Glasgow, everyone departed in their usual state of companionable apathy. Despite punishment rooms and nudity, we had witnessed a very grey couple of hours in the cinema.
On the other hand, maybe this Cosi fan tutte is a genuinely radioactive experience. If so: hurrah! I have sat through enough tedious evenings of Festival theatre to prefer the heat generated by a genuinely startling work to the smell of brain-death found in many tamer performances.