Room In Rome

I really wanted to enjoy Room In Rome. Honest! What's not to love in the summary: a Julio Medem film, the same man behind cult classic Sex and Lucia. It's set in balmy Italy. It stars two smoking hot ladies with fat lips and shapely bums. It has lots of erotic scenes where the ladies lez-up then bare their souls. Sounds great on paper, just cringe-worthy in execution. I think it began to lose me when the women debated whether to penetrate themselves with either a beer bottle or boiled cucumber. There's really no way to recover from that. Thus, the campy fromage of bloated erotic fare began to drown out all the soft, warm lighting, body worship and skin iconography. Their expository back-stories are histrionically told, then revealed to be fabrications or embellished fantasies of the lowest order. The audience tires quickly of being jerked around, yet these ladies seemingly do not. They float between 69ing to surfing googlemaps like they were changing brands of cereal. This type of titillation, whilst feminist in intention, does ladies a disservice, as it reads as dear at best and exploitative, male-controlled lesbianism at worst. Idealized lesbians gauzed through the male gaze are great for moving units, but as a film with such an opera-soaked score as this, there should be more truth in the artsy-fartsy beauty. If you want feminist narratives, go see Thelma and Louise or The Children's Hour. If you want hot lezzer action, go to YouPorn. Room in Rome succeeds in neither category.