Going Under II
» BDSM in Popular Culture
A while back I was looking for information about Going Under a movie about a psychiatrist who falls in love with a ProDomme. While the movie came out in 2004 reviews have only recently emerged. Suggesting that perhaps it was languishing in deserved cinematic obscurity.
Only when this cracks does the film feel authentic; but the director, Eric Werthman, a practicing psychotherapist, presents Peter and Suzanne’s dilemma like a case study from his own files rather than a real, flesh-and-blood-and-handcuffs relationship. The distance is compounded by the movie’s eye-straining interiors, awash in red filtered shadows and the occasional flare of pasty white flesh.
Going Under: My Fair Dominatrix, a Love Story
At times, inchoate ideas (emotional wounds hurt deeper than physical pain?) threaten to congeal into an actual theme, but that turns out to be, like the rest of the film, a drawn-out tease. Just because Rees can play a masochist doesn’t mean viewers have to.
Going Under is the feature directorial debut of 65-year-old Eric Werthman, who has been a practicing psychotherapist for a quarter of a century. If you’re not already seeing a shrink, Mr. Werthman, may we suggest that you start immediately.
Lechner credibly evinces Suzanne’s feelings about never feeling comfortable enough to get past how she met Peter, but while the flame-out of their relationship is reasonably well acted, the film arrogantly approaches their dominant-submissive power exchange like a psychopathia sexualis to be studied and pitied for its emotionally clogging effects.
The red-lit dungeon scenes manage the remarkable feat of being lurid, clinical and really embarrassing at the same time; the embarrassment is occasioned less by the copious nudity — all by Rees — explicit intimacies and fetishistic eroticism (including but not limited to stretching on a rack, piercing and flogging) than because the painfully pretentious voice-overs are so painfully banal.