Author: remedy

REVIEW in Programmkino

REMEDY tells of the emotional journey of the leading woman in a seductive low-budget indie look, that reminds a bit of cinema verité and the style of Wong Kar-Wai … but is in any case a far cry from high-gloss productions like EYES WIDE SHUT. – Programmkino

REMEDY got reviewed by Programmkino.de!

(Translation by Toby Tentakel.)

A club in New York. A young woman, her name shall remain unknown, watches a BDSM performance. “Do you know someone who does that?” She asks a friend. “That’s not for you,” he replies. This is the beginning: a challenge, a game. The woman contacts a professional BDSM studio and now calls herself Mistress Remedy. She meets her colleagues and learns the processes, equipment and No-Gos: The women don’t undress and have not – at least officially – sex with clients. Prostitution is illegal in the United States.

Based on her own experience as a professional switch (someone who can assume both the dominant and submissive role), Cheyenne Picardo tells of Remedy’s encounters and the emotions involved with them. Some scenes are quite bizarre. The very first customer wants, for example, a dental treatment with anesthetics from Remedy, but she instead puts him to sleep with a foot massage. Another loves to be used as a piece of furniture while two women smoke and talk about their relationship life. Unlike countless pseudo-documentaries on TV, REMEDY is not about showing the most shocking fantasies imaginable, but rather the interpersonal life, what is happening invisibly between Remedy and her customers. With one client, for example, she starts a contest to see who can endure the most pain, a game that appeals to Remedy. Another one teaches her professional bondage and ties her into a stylish package after he notices her lousy technique.

On the way home (one of the very few moments that take place outside the studio) you can see Remedy in the subway, dreaming. She finally decides to work as a sub, to be dominated by customers. This will get her more money, but she does not yet expect how intense and disturbing this experience will get for her.

REMEDY tells of the emotional journey of the leading woman in a seductive low-budget indie look, that reminds a bit of cinema verité and the style of Wong Kar-Wai (Picardo cites Leigh, Cronenberg and Lizzie Borden as her role models), but is in any case a far cry from high-gloss productions like EYES WIDE SHUT. In the corner of one of the sordid playrooms are buckets and a broom, a throne with a wooden cross is poorly attached to the wall and might tip over any time. This depiction does not diminish the emotional intensity of the narrated scenes at all, which is especially due to Kira Davies credible depiction of Remedy as a curious, open-minded and intelligent character who is also inexperienced and prone to overconfidence. Finally, Remedy’s self-experience experiment demands too much of her. Cheyenne Picardo stages this neither as a complete disaster, nor does she hold the BDSM scene responsible for Remedy’s collapse. REMEDY tells of how valuable, entertaining, sometimes painful but definitely interesting it is to make experiences with other people.

 

“Domme Shorts”

So it seems appropriate to mention the other film about sex work I’m working on — it’s a cycle of twelve shorts (or more if I get to them) called, simply, WORK. Yes, I know I kind of overdo it with the all-caps thing. I probably don’t use em dashes appropriately either.

The first one called “Timewasters” appears below, and is a comedic short film featuring two dommes who are waiting for clients who will never show up, as emails they have written to the dommes are read in voiceover. (Yes, the emails are real client emails, only altered to make them keyword unsearchable at my consultant’s request.)

WORK Episode 1: Timewasters from The One That Got Away on Vimeo.

What I love about this is that every piece in the cycle will either be inspired by things I have gone through or things other sex workers have seen or done. I believe in the power of narrative to do the best job of capturing the truth of sex work, but that’s only possible with more than just one voice harmonizing in the work.

The top image is some of the ideas floated by one of the workers I’ve consulted (with a few of my own peppered in there)… I never have been great at preproduction.

When the director has doubts…

So I’ve been going through my Facebook messages since deciding that I no longer wanted to have a personal account on the networking site for a number of reasons. Advertisements, the cockamamie decency polcies, #namergate (or whatever the kids were calling it), and my natural distaste for things that people try to convince me are “indispensable.”

I came upon this conversation, with some edits for clarity.

HIM: My girl friend watched the movie for the first time yesterday, and unfortunately she was really upset and angry about it afterwards

ME: uhhhhhh okay
Did you assure her I’m very much alive and working again?

HIM: yeah, she did know that part before already
it was more like that she thought, the film itself without more explanations could give some problematic representation for people not associated with the BDSM scene
like when they watch it, they could think this all is “normal” (which in a sad way it often is) in a BDSM house and that those women working there could be nothing more than play toys

ME: Yeah, that’s something I struggle with.
Which is why I have to [publicly support sex worker activism] or I risk doing real damage.

HIM: My girlfriend is very sex-positive and into BDSM for a long time – and she also has a deep understanding for sex-workers and their struggles and problems, so the idea of [Safe Sane Consensual] is very important for her, especially in communicating this to beginners or people just [becoming] interested in BDSM

ME: [This is why I chose to] make it clear that this is me, and I made the film, and lived it.
And that I know it’s fucked up. But I want the audience to know it’s fucked up. I just have to follow it up with ways that audiences can know what needs to change to make it LESS fucked up.

HIM: Yeah, she has nothing against you, don’t worry, and the film was also impressive for her, she just missed some kind of message to the people telling them: hey, there are some things that went wrong here (not only from your own [personal] side), but rather from the bad working conditions and the general acceptance and reputation of sex workers in society.

ME: Yeah, it’s implicit — but so systemic that people might miss it.

….

HIM: She thought it could be [interpreted] as “the way it is supposed to be,” not “the way it sometimes is but that should not be.” Make sense?

ME: Yes, but hrmmmm unsure how anyone would get that it’s the “way it’s supposed to be”

HIM: Well, she thinks it could very likely be that someone sees such situations in a dungeon for the first time, and thinks, hey, since it is a legal grey area and a woman there has not much security, I can do pretty much whatever I want with her. we pretty much talked all night about this

ME: Yes, but that’s already the case. That’s not something promoted by my film. That’s ALREADY HAPPENING.
You don’t get change by telling people that everyone in the industry is doing peachy creamy. But you also don’t get change by making it seem like everyone is a trafficked slave.

HIM: That’s why Remedy worked (for me) both on the level of telling a (your) personal story, but also showing the situations that could (and do) happen to other sex-workers, in a very powerful way. And I agree with you that press and discussions and education around such a film is probably a step in the right direction to make people not only aware of the issues, but also that a change is necessary.

So here’s the thing. I’m TERRIFIED that people will misinterpret the film. It’s happened a few times, but I feel it is the risky part of making art. Once you’ve created something and released it into the world, really the interpretation is out of your hands. Sure, by attaching my legal name to the project, I’m standing behind my work in a way that perhaps I couldn’t do if I either used a pseudonym or talked about my story in the third person. But I created an immersive, subjective film. I deliberately invite viewers to put themselves wholly into my main character. If you come to the narrative with notions that sex work leads to victimhood, then I almost guarantee you will walk away from the film believing that REMEDY is the story of a victim. If you believe that sex work is like any other job where there are good days and bad days, where the risk is really due to an unsafe legal and political environment versus there being any thing “wrong” with the work itself, then you will see the film as supporting this perspective.

Here’s the thing — and this is a bit of a confession here — when I started making the film, I was convinced the reason I had a less than stellar experience working in a dungeon was that I was bad at it! (I never ever thought that the job or BDSM was the “problem,” by the way. I never judged the work or my coworkers. Only myself, and very harshly.) I would have agreed with the victim narrative because I was actively victim blaming myself. We were halfway through filming — specifically The Businessman scene — when I figured out what really made the job ultimately unsustainable for me, and that it wasn’t my stupidity or naivete.

Long story short, I started the process a victim and ended it an activist.

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