Lars von Trier’s Zentropa Films has co-produced director Jessica Nilsson’s All About Anna, billed as a sexually explicit but uplifting romance. The movie will be distributed in the United States by Wicked, and was made in Denmark last year.
The press release compares it favorably to Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny in light of it being a sexually explicit film with mainstream backing. I was disturbed by the trend of intelligent people liking The Brown Bunny. I thought it should have been called The Brown Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker Kills a Chinese Bookie While Jerking Off in a Mirror with Drying Paint And a Blowjob at the End but She’s Dead: Big Fucking Deal Bunny.
So comparing something favorably to that movie doesn’t really do it for me.
All About Anna tells the story of a costume designer (Bay) who is unlucky in love. The director’s cut restores closeup scenes of genital contact and there is a fellatio scene performed to completion by Eileen Daly. I assume Wicked will be distributing the hardcore version.
The filmmakers seem to disagree on whether or not the movie is pornographic, which either means it is geared toward women (it is) or the sex is not interesting (haven’t seen it). Movies like John Cameron Mitchell’s Short Bus or the French film Baise Moi have also attempted to wed story to porn with varying degrees of success.
von Trier’s company has produced the exquisite Breaking the Waves and the erratic Dogville, as well as the tasty and frightening The Kingdom. It will be interesting to see what it does with this pornographic/non-pornographic All About Anna.
Commenters on IMDb have savaged the movie, saying it was not enough of a story to be saved by hardcore sex and the sex was not good enough to qualify it as a good couples’ film.
That the first sex scene was shot in Gry Bay’s apartment in front of a picture window seems interesting, though.
Previously: O: The Humanity; Visit her face too roughly
See also: All About Anna on MySpace, All About Anna official website; All About Anna on IMDb
“Gry Bay?”