“Why are you borrowing my movies?” Andrea Absolon (Natalia Germani), better known by the name Leo De Mae at the time, asks her father in Her Body when she finds videotapes of his works while visiting her parents. “So that no one else can borrow them,” answers Andrea’s father sternly.
The story of Absolonová clearly offered itself to be adapted into a film. In the nineties, she could have been a world diving champion. When she suffered a serious spinal injury during training just before the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, which ruined a promising sports career, Absolon adopted the stage name Lea De Mae and made porn films until her untimely death at the age of 27. At the same time, she didn’t really move away from sports that much.
Fear of rejection
“Since I was little, you told me that I should be the best,” Absolonová reminds her father. And when he gets upset that he had something else in mind, he just shrugs. “This is a sport too.”
The first news that a film adaptation of the tragic story of the famous porn actress was being created appeared in 2015. Even then, the media used the opportunity to recap the fate of the so-called háelpéček category. The combination of a busy life, unfulfilled ambitions, unexpected twists and an early death, wrapped in the story of a young, attractive woman, was too interesting to ignore.
It is immediately clear from Her Body that director Natálie Císařovská does not want to mine the sensation, on the contrary, she uses the story to bear witness to manipulation, and the link between sport and porn shows to be much stronger than it might seem at first glance.
Absolonová only knows drill in the film. For her trainer, she is no more than a body that must be in good enough shape, she must not have even an extra kilo, she must be firm, perfect. If he doesn’t, he’s in danger of a hard fall. But Absolonová is not afraid of pain, but of rejection. To prevent it, she vomits all the excess calories. Maybe even the ones her own mother tries to stuff down her throat. Her favorite spaghetti.
Everyone tells Andrea what is best for her. Few people speak to her other than in announcement sentences, or directly in commands. But it seems to bother me less when filming porn. Maybe it’s because Absolon can hide behind an exotic pseudonym here. Unlike the hard work of sports, results, awards and admiration come much faster. And there must be some relief in the fact that finally no one on the set looks like they want something more than just her body from Absolonová.
Too much chlorine
This is also why the director allows so little to enter the head of his heroine. The viewer observes her gestures and facial expressions all the time. He only guesses what is going on inside, as if he were watching her under the surface. And soon he discovers that behind the mysterious fashion of a woman who reveals everything except her own interior, there is a… too superficial scenario.
The depersonalized, surgically sterile atmosphere that pervades Her body regularly disintegrates thanks to it. Sometimes during the hackneyed exchange of parents about the ruined lives they compensate for on the children, another time when a big animal of the porn industry appears on the scene, in fact a guy whose charisma is not even worth a wet swimsuit. Unfortunately, that could be said about the entire film. For all its sterility, it cannot draw in, wake up the viewer from lethargy, immerse him in unpleasant emotions or perhaps shock him. Not even when cunnilingus or straight vaginal sex is practiced on screen.
The message of Her Body is important enough to pull together the entire film. However, her body does not manage to convincingly describe a person whose life has radically changed its direction, nor to evoke the sultry atmosphere of the set when filming sweaty intercourse or perhaps anxious lunches at the family table. The film seems to have gone through not only editing, but also chlorine disinfection, which drained the believability out of it. Her body is a carefully practiced jump that ends not in a deep dive, but in a splash into the water.
Despite its shortcomings, Císařovská’s feature-length debut should be taken as a promise for Czech cinematography. With her arrival, domestic film expands to include other, purely contemporary themes and perhaps even a new author’s vision.
Movie: Her Body
Drama, Czech Republic / Slovakia, 2023, 108 min.
Director: Natálie Císařovská
Screenplay: Natálie Císařovská, Aneta Honzková
Starring: Natalia Germani, Denisa Barešová, Zuzana Mauréry, Martin Finger, Cyril Dobrý, Zuzana Stivínová, Tereza Švejdová, Karolína Krézlová, Štěpán Lustyk
2023-11-17 01:40:43
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