Following 1985's portrait of a BDSM enclave in Seduction: The Cruel Woman (released with the taglines “The Women Hit Back” and “A Ticket to a Masochistic Wonderland”), Monika Treut's solo directorial debut, Virgin Machine (1988), takes a step back from the world of kink and fetish to show us one woman's path toward penetrating it. Dorothee (Ina Blum) is caught in a stale rut between her ambiguous job researching "romantic love," her unsexily domineering ex-beau Heinz (Gad Klein), who won't leave her alone, and her infatuation with her half-brother Bruno (Marcelo Uriona). After Bruno shares intel on their mother, who fled Germany a long time ago for America, Dorothee leaves Hamburg behind for San Francisco in search of the woman she's supposedly meant to look up to. While the search for her Mutter is on the fritz, Dorothee encounters several women who do a much better job at becoming her chosen kin in California, bringing with them both the good and the bad of family values, as well as plenty of sex talks.
“Romantic love was my fantastic illusion,” Dorothee says when we first meet her, observing heterosexual couples and consulting a comically gluttonous hormone expert. Although her research will remain vague to us, Dorothee is ultimately seeking what’s on everyone’s mind—"What is love?"—but decidedly nixes conventional interviewing for the wisdom of lived sexual experience, all in the name of journalism. While her life in West Germany followed the egotistical whims of the boring men in her home and office, San Francisco immediately thrusts her into a world of women. In this Oz, nobody is demanding to surrender Dorothee. (Unless, of course, that's what she's into.)
Treut never makes it clear what sexual experiences are new to Dorothee. Whether or not she's having a "discovery" moment is irrelevant for us spectators, like when she's learning about dildos and condoms from Susie Sexpert (played by real-life feminist sex writer Susie Bright) or flirting with a mustachioed drag king (Shelly Mars) who uses both a peeled banana and a bottled drink as stand-in dicks. Virgin Machine is not about resolving family matters, nor is it about sexual awakening. It delivers its loose narrative through the thinly connected character studies Dorothee encounters, aptly being described as "part sapphic travelogue" by the film’s distributor, MUSCLE. The film is a simple ode to liberation: from routine, from boredom, from curiosity, from societal and self-imposed expectations.
Virgin Machine screens this evening, October 12, and on October 14 and 18, at Anthology Film Archives as part of the series "Female Misbehavior: The Films of Monika Treut."
