El diablo en la señorita Jones

After Deep Throat showed that narrative porn could be a commercial draw, Gerard Damiano made a number of films that are many times better in every respect and which are unjustly overshadowed by his widely cited hit. The Devil in Miss Jones represents a regular contribution to porn chic, because here, unlike in Deep Throat, it’s possible to talk about aspects like cinematography, music, acting, the screenplay and dramaturgy. At its core, it is an almost brilliantly simple concept that elevates the premise to an outstanding result. Factually speaking, we have here an unbroken chain of sex scenes depicting the broadest range of practices, bordered on either side by plot sequences, almost exactly in the ratio of 1:2:1. However, it is these narrative sequences, and Georgina Spelvin’s performance, that elevate sex above the superficial physical act and make it an expressive image of the central character’s development. The Devil in Miss Jones is an unexpectedly feminist but also intellectually multi-layered work. It’s the story of a middle-aged woman who spent her entire life in chaste abstinence and, thanks to a second chance from a representative of hell, returns to experience carnal pleasure. The plot directly tracks how the initially timid protagonist soon takes the initiative. Her sexual awakening and indulgence in her own pleasure establishes her as the centre of both the narrative and the formalistic treatment. Instead of the later prevailing trend, the woman is not an object, but rather an active element and, from the first initiation, the men are conversely gradually reduced to objects serving for her pleasure. Accordingly, the camera focuses primarily on the protagonist’s face and conversely fragments the male bodies, which are almost literally reduced to sex organs (see the great sequence in which the protagonist and another woman share one penis). The men mostly do not speak at all, while the protagonist explicitly verbalises her desires and the experience of pleasure itself. Also, cumshots are either completely absent (the first sex scene) or used only as part of the women’s passionate experience of sex. If we add to this the formalistic refinement of the individual sequences (from the delicate passage culminating in suicide, through the fleshing out of the sex scenes mixing erotic suggestion with the literalness of pornography, to the outstanding use of Morricone’s music in the self-gratification sequence), we have here a film in which sex is not an appendage or an attraction standing apart from the plot, but rather an excellent portrait of sexual flourishing that is equally a celebration of carnal pleasure and a reflection on its repression. The Devil in Miss Jones not only implies opposition to the suppression of sexuality through religious dogma (and not only that), but it also presents a notable reflection on the foundations of Christian mysticism. Hell here is not in the form of bodily torment, but the eternal denial of the pleasure of bodily experiences. The woman who has spent her entire life in celibacy thus becomes a doubly tragic character and the mysticism that justifies repression with respect to the body in religions conversely proves to be the work of people who characteristically had no idea about sexuality or any experience of it. (25.01.2015) (menos) (más)