The Life and Death of a Porno Gang

I've been terribly disappointed recently with the imitative state of world cinema. Few works have broken from the pack to assert their unique qualities.

A Serbian movie that has gotten more than its share of attention recently is Serbian Movie (reviewed on this blog).

However, the Serbian movie that truly deserves all the attention the other is getting is Mladen Djordjevic's The Life and Death of A Porno Gang (caught recently at a packed festival screening). This film, my friends, is a goddamn masterpiece.

The Life and Dearth of a Porno Gang does boast extreme content, but it's no mere showcase for it . On the contrary, it's a beautifully written, sharply edited, well acted, devastatingly emotional drama about a group of misfits attempting to survive in a world devoid of humanity and battered by years of war. The film's power, believe it or not, comes from its considerable restraint.

The film is not classifiable. It is what it is, and what it is is great.


The set-up is deceptively simple and does not telegraph the film's major revelations. Marko (Mihajlo Jovanovic) is an ambitious film director whose attempts to make a meangingful feature film are wearing him down. When he crosses paths with Cane (Srdjan Miletic), a shady porno producer, some work results. He gathers a crew of desperate misfits around him and creates some fairly conventional pornography. But Marko's ambitions are broader, and he yearns to create something truly groundbreaking and transgressive. His idea is a traveling porno cabaret in which sex acts are performed in front of mostly peasant audiences throughout the country. Although the gang encounters opposition to its venture from within and outside, they experience a sense of freedom and protest that fuels their passion. Unfortunately, the cabaret doesn't ultimately pay the bills, and the group begins to fracture. But when a mysterious stranger named Franc appears and offers Marko a way to make buckets of money, the group enters a world of murk from which they can't possibly recover.

In tone, The Life and Death of a Porno Gang feels like something the Vienesse Aktionists might have made had they made narrative features at their peak. The traveling cabaret of perversion is a wonderful creation. It is both a celebration of sexual freedom and a guilt-free waltz with debauchery. Performed with Fellini-esque abandon, it provides the perfect dramatic centerpiece to a tale that revolves around the choices men and women make and their hefty consequences.


In every sense of the word, this is pure cinema, and it strikes provocative chords rarely struck these days. Admirably, It does not shy away from depicting fetishes and paraphilias that are usually the domain of the hardest worldwide web sites. Snippets of hardcore bestiality appear alongside harsh depictions of intercourse and even harsher drama involving voluntary murder and consensual snuff. Emphasizing characters and relationships over brutal set pieces, it achieves greatness as dramatic cinema and greatness as truly transgressive art.

Rumor has it that Synapse may be releasing the film in 2011. I look forward to a stellar presentation of the material.

Also of interest is the director's Made in Serbia, a fascinating look at life in the marginalized Serbian porn industry.

Deep Inside A Sex Pervert's Diary

Currently experiencing a relentless illness, so posts have been spotty at best for the last few months. Reading has been difficult. I've been unable to focus on anything for more than five minutes.

I sense recovery is finally afoot since I was able to get through Joji Numata's A Sex Pervert's Diary in less than 24 hours. I consumed this book like a hungry alligator and relished its raw, nihilistic truth.

The book shares common ground with Brett Eastin Ellis's American Psycho in that the focus here is also on minutia -- in this case, minutia associated with erotomania (or sexual obsession).

The book is initially structured like a first person piece of non-fiction in which the narrator describes his obsessions and fetishes in excruciatingly fine detail. You get the sense that he might be a reformed pervert (and I mean that in the nicest way) who's done some jail time and has finally seen the "error" of his ways. Thankfully, this isn't the case.

Although I have no proof, fact is surely molesting fiction here, and it is the book's blending of an authentic Japanese perspective on girl trolling with ultra-deviant fantasies that makes it such a ripping good read. Although it is focused exclusively on a thirty-seven year old Japanese man's attempt to wrestle with his erotic demons, the book will speak to men everywhere. It is, in fact, a chillingly truthful expose of the way men think and what drives them.

I've always said that if women were privy to the carnal carnival of the male mind, the majority would board planes en masse and flee in terror from the oncoming scourge. To be fair, a minority of honest women would remain behind and probably enjoy the party. Both types of women will take different lessons from the hot literary lava bubbling inside the covers of this gem.

'As always, the sight of a naked girl was disappointing at first,' Numata writes. 'The anticipation and fantasizing had built up my expectations to a pitch which couldn't possibly be matched by the real thing. The moment I'm faced with the reality of a woman's naked body, I only see her defects. But soon the imperfections no longer seem as important. The mere fact that I am seeing her in such a shameful condition gives me a thrill which goes beyond any aesthetic satisfaction I might derive from admiring a body's beauty.'

The Japanese definition of "shame" in a constant through the book, carrying the weight of a potent aphrodisiac.

Numata's describing of the vagina as a "clam" makes for numerous memorable passages. His ruminations on men's bizarre and contrary relationship with the clam is often hilarious, disturbing, and priceless.

'They should hold contests to see which girl has the most attractive clam. And they should show nothing but the clam, never mind about her face or the rest of her body. What if an unattractive, chubby little slut had a gem of an omanko (vagina)? Wouldn't that be a nice irony? And then we should be able to see all those omankos of all those beautiful girls with their perfect bodies. Wrinkly blue-gray blubber lips hidden away down between their legs. They should go around with photographs of their clams hanging around their necks with a caption proclaiming: "This is what we really look like inside." Omankos are basically ugly things, and smelly to boot. If men weren't programmed to be triggered into lust by the sight of them, we would avoid them like the plague. You don't know what it's like when a girl is all hot and aroused, in heat, and she spreads her thighs before you to reveal that ugly clam. Basically, a man buries his penis into it just to avoid looking at it.'

Personally, I find vaginas to be extraordinarily enchanting (with some exceptions), so I'm not with Numata on this issue -- still, it is his stubborn adherence to a dizzying point of view that makes every word of this book a chewable feast.

Like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, the protagonist pervert of A Sex Pervert's Diary is a supreme provocateur, and you will not tire of his non-stop ranting and instructive commentary on everything sexual from upskirt photography to changing room stalking to teenage prostitution to fetishes red, yellow, brown and cotton.

First published in Japan in 2003, the book became a bestseller immediately and continues to sell with the speed of a drunk girl's panties being yanked to her knees.

Highly recommended with warnings for sensitive souls.

The book is published in the US by iUniverse, Inc.

Translation is by Thomas Boggs.