Flesh

1968 "Just an ordinary day in the life of a male hustler."
5.7| 1h29m| NA| en| More Info
Released: 16 December 1968 Released
Producted By: Factory Films
Country: United States of America
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website:
Info

A heroin junkie works as a prostitute to support his habit and fund an abortion needed by the girlfriend of his lesbian wife. His seedy encounters with delusional and damaged clients, and dates with drag queens and hustlers are heavy on sex, drugs and decadence.

Genre

Drama

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Director

Paul Morrissey

Production Companies

Factory Films

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Flesh Audience Reviews

Cubussoli Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!
Listonixio Fresh and Exciting
Console best movie i've ever seen.
Cheryl A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.
jaibo A heap of human flesh lies asleep on a red pillow. This is the hunk of naked meat that is "Little Joe", a New York hustler who lives with his bisexual wife and baby child. The film follows a day in his life, after he's woken from sleep by his wife demanding that he go out and do the traditional male thing - be a breadwinner. But the use she wants to put the bread to is to pay for her new girlfriend's abortion. We certainly aren't in the traditional family unit here...After playing with his child, Joe hits the streets to cruise for johns. The clients come thick and fast: the ordinary gay man who wants to meet him again because they "work well together", the old English classical scholar who pays $100 to see Joe pose like an ancient Greek athlete; the female topless dancer who blows Joe then boasts about being raped; the ageing gym bunny who doesn't think that what he and Joe do together is queer. After a hard day's work, Joe returns home exhausted, only to be put down by his wife and the girlfriend. He goes back to sleep as they harp and undermine him.Flesh is fascinating as it takes what is a traditional classical mainstream structure - it has an inciting incident (the money for the abortion) and set-up, a confrontation and a resolution (albeit a very downbeat one), even a protagonist with a strongly motivated goal, and then proceeds to concentrate on the details of the day to day routine of these people who are perfectly ordinary to themselves but extraordinary to most "mainstream" people. It all seems very authentic and natural - it's hard to see the acting, the actors are so fully being their roles - but yet the whole thing is a piece of cunning artifice - a beautifully drawn portrait or an intricately carved statue. Director Morrissey carefully plants every incident, every encounter around his theme of human flesh become packaged commodity but with such cunning slight of hand that you almost don't notice him doing it. The wife "packages" Joe's sexual organ, the old Englishmen laments a long gone order of classical beauty which created art and poetry from human fleshly beauty, the transvestite friends of the stripper package themselves as women whilst reading a Hollywood magazine in which "real" women are packaged as products; the gym bunny buys Joe's friendship and affection, thinks artificial porn is real and can't tell, as we can't, that Joe is performing his friendship and intimacy for the cash. The film itself presents itself as the ne plus ultra of cinematic realism but what we might as well be dealing with here is fine art or an early example of concept art.The genius - a word not lightly used - of Morrissey was to find a way of taking Warhol's arty pretensions to film-making, which were interesting sure but boring as hell, and making them into saleable products which remain amongst the most intriguing works of cinema art ever made - commercial cans labelled "Flesh" and "Trash" and "Heat" with a product label - "Andy Warhol" - which sells an idea about the product as much as the product itself. Yet just as you reel from Morrissey's cynicism, you are spellbound by his ability to still maintain the highest of standards and depth of meaning. The constant what seem like camera flashes continually draw attention to the filmic nature of what one is witnessing, yet you get drawn into the illusion all the same - Flesh is surely one of the most extraordinary pieces of cinema magic to ever spellbind an audience.
nycruise-1 This is the epitome of the "experimental" genre.Very often, films like this are simply created at the whim of the director and producer - neither of whom really know what the outcome will be.These kinds of films usually are exercises in self-indulgence."Flesh" is no different. It's just that a lot of Andy and Paul do with Joe (and I'm sure that many of the scenes were realized fantasies of Andy's about Joe).Is this is a good movie? a bad movie? The answer is neither - it exists to be viewed by the people who are familiar with this genre.
bastard wisher In a lot of ways this film defines the essence of everything I love about cinema, in terms of capturing those strange, elusive moments of unguarded truth. In other ways, it is undeniably an amateurish, unfocused result of junkies self-indulgently fooling around with a camera. Ultimately it comes out somewhere between pure brilliance and unwatchability (thankfully much more so the former than the latter). Part of me wants to reward it solely for it's absolute innovativeness and moments of pure sublimity, but at the same time I can't completely ignore the occasionally downright awful "acting" and overtly bad production values. At first the editing seems overwhelmingly sloppy and needlessly distracting (or maybe just wrongheadedly "innovative"), but after a while I got used to it, which is, in the end, the true sign of whether a film succeeds on it's own terms or not. I guess that answer basically sums up my all-around feelings for the film. That is, despite it's in-ignorable flaws, on a whole it does work very well. And, if nothing else, a film like this really shows how false and contrived the faux-documentary, shaky-cam style can sometimes be when it so obviously applied purely for effect (such as in films like the otherwise admirable Roger Dodger). Here the aesthetics are plainly derived from the necessities of the filming situation, and are not just used arbitrarily to make it look "cool".
JAGUAR-5 Although there is very little plot and whatever exists is just all improvisational, still it was a good start from a new director with no previous financial back up and also a smart move from Andy Warhol to make his cimematic productions more marketable and viewer-friendly. In any case this story of a street hustler relies too much on showing Joe buck naked (almost all the time!). And the creative use of a flashy editing really wears off after the hundredth time and the cutting off the dialog thing gets really annoying half-way. This would have been a much more entertaining or even dramatic if they made a documentary of the daily of an actual male prostitute or hustler, instead of letting the actors make up some nonesensical plot and dialog of their own.