The Pet

I enjoyed the first half of the trailer … the two main characters seemed charming and romantic, and I was looking forward to seeing the movie. Then the whole business went down the tubes into “action-triller” land. Bleh. What a shame.

just helps me understand someone i love very much.

I have serious misgivings. The trailer starts out “Pretty Woman” meets “Secretary”, but then it turns into very different territory. Mixing up the fantasy of a world in which rich people keep consensual slaves/pets with the reality of human trafficking and kidnapping is a big mistake. Kinky people will say, that’s fake, and vanilla people will have their worst fears about kink lifestyle confirmed.

It certainly isn’t a BDSM “Brokeback Mountain.”

To me it just looks like a thriller with a bit of kinky sex added. The idea of keeping a woman in a cage will probably titillate a few of the men.

I doubt it will affect the perception of D/s since I don’t see it becoming a hugely successful movie (at least in the US).

From MySpace:

The film The Pet is presented in three acts, the first two of which are exclusively devoted to the loving relationship that develops between master and pet, I dont think Id be giving too much away to say that at the crisis/climax of the movie, our leading lady realizes that its not the money or the wealth of her partner that is keeping her in this relationship she genuinely loves him and prefers to live in this lifestyle to living in the vanilla world at any price. He also makes extraordinary sacrifices on her behalf at this climactic point.

The introduction of non-consensual slavery at the beginning and in the third act serves the following purposes: it shows the beauty and intimacy of their relationship when contrasted with people who care nothing for the human condition; it creates a greater evil that the regular movie-goer will understand; it also clearly separates our loving relationship from the world of non-consensual or coerced slavery.

In The Pet the film-makers tried hard to make no judgments on the lifestyle other than to show its a fully consensual act from both participants. We did have an advisor on the shooting of the film who is active in the BDSM world and great care was taken with research and interviews to make sure what we portray in the film is accurate.

The Pet sounds like a movie that starts out a BDSM fantisy and steps into the reality that the evil of money and bad people do exist in this world.

This movie was shown at Cannes in May and is schedueled for direct release to DVD in the US on December 5th. The purpose of the Cannes exhibition was to find a distributor, which apparently failed. Those interested in tracking the status of the film should monitor www.tlavideo.com, although the web site does not yet reflect the projected release date. D. Stevens, the writer/director, is a still photographer by profession who is directing his first film of any kind.

Having just trudged though this movie with, I must admit, a heavy hand on the fast forward button on my DVD remote control, I can only react by saying that this movie should be titled “Clueless.” It just, frankly, has no clue as to BDSM or the human relationship they are attemting to portray. Poor production values, bad acting, incredibly insipid dialogue and an absurd plot that degenerates into a world wide organ theft society are secondary to the fact that the producers and director are just lost. I had the feeling I was watching a soccer fan trying to recreate a baseball game after watching an inning of a little league game. What a disappointment.

I really wanted to like this movie, and for that reason I watched it in its entirety even though I knew I was in for a dissapointment before it was half over. I won’t comment on the acting, since it is difficult to find award winning actors who want to be associated with a movie like this. Pierre Du Lat certainly didn’t seem to have enough confidence for a Master, but I thought that Andrea Edmondson played the part well. My gripe is about the story itself. There are many people who are in the BDSM lifestyle, myself included. Most of them are average people who do not own multimillion dollar homes or chauffeur driven limousines. Some are wealthy, but most live in middle class homes, and they certainly do not hire people to look for complete strangers on the street to be their slaves. Most people meet online or at D/s organized events (ie. fetish clubs, munches, etc…), and others are able to get partners who they already have a romantic relationship with interested. It is not uncommon for some to mark their slaves, but I have never heard of anyone tagging a slave’s ear.

What bothered me the most about this movie though was that someone in the D/s community was associated with actual human trafficking. Human trafficking is highly illegal and not something whch the vast majority of people in the bdsm community find apalling, just like everyone else. Also, people get sold for a lot less than $200,000. People are sold for less than $100 in many places and many young attractive girls are sold into slavery for less than $5,000 in Western nations. It selling a human beings could fetch six figures, kidnapping would be an epidemic by now. The movie would have been considerably better if Mary and Philip had met online or at a D/s event and taken their time to get to know one another, after which Philip introduced Mary to different aspects of BDSM a little at a time. Even people who like being treated like animals would not let someone who they have only known for a matter of days strip them naked, place a shock collar around their neck, and lock them in a cage. It takes time to develop that bond and the girls in this movie were much too eager to let someone else take complete control of them.

Furthermore, being kept 24/7 as a human pet and treated as such is something that even most people in the bdsm world would not like. Some people like to be kept slaves, 24/7, but most have vanilla lives in the real world. They are teachers, police officers, professors, lawyers, doctors, IT professionals, nurses, construction workers, and they indulge in their fantasies when they are at home. For the ones that do like to be kept as slaves 24/7, they will often want more than to just be caged and led on a leash. These things could include being spanked or whipped, and also being restrained with bondage. That is not something which would necessarily be used as a punishment, some people actually enjoy the feel of a whip. While some people in the lifestyle do enjoy forced chastity, the Master/slave relationship is quite often a sexual relationship. Not including that part alone in the movie didn’t bother me, but showcasing a D/s relationship where someone is always kept naked and either in a cage, or on a leash, and little of anything else did.

If you want a much better portrayal of a D/s relationship in a mainstream movie, go watch Secretary. Although I still have a couple gripes about that movie, the two biggest ones being that Maggie Gyllenhaal’s character was someone who had just been in an insane asylum and that a lawyer would be so stupid as to spank a subordinate of the opposite sex at work without having had any type of relationship with her in the past. Come on, that just screams “Sue me!”