BDSM – Remedy

Review in Perlentaucher.de (with English Translation)

Click here to read the review in the original German.

“Remedy” by Cheyenne Picardo is a film about sex work that succeeds without dark secrets

These days, when looming shadows in 50 shades of gray are poised to introduce sadomasochism not just to housewife-literature but also to blockbuster cinema, at the periphery of all the hype a substantially more raw and less polished film is about to arrive in German theaters. First-time U.S. director Cheyenne Picardo is familiar with the material she describes, since she presents her own story with that of Remedy. Like her protagonist, who calls herself “Mistress Remedy”, Picardo spent 18 months—while studying at film school—as a sex worker at an S&M brothel; and in spite of all cliches that tend to stubbornly accompany cinematic treatments of prostitution, no dark secret lurking in the shadows is at the root of this. When Remedy is asked what prompted the idea she answers simply, someone told her she’d never dare do it.

A slight and trivial reason to temporarily become a prostitute; but that exactly is the point; and these days in which the PorNo! campaign is eagerly exhumed while the human rights of sex workers are trampled with enthusiastic self-righteousnessness, it’s an important point. Sex work as a service-industry profession, with some highlights and an (in no way glossed-over) shadow side as well, but not a tragedy overshadowing one’s entire biography—that’s the story Picardo tells in Remedy with the full weight of lived experience .

This does not mean that Remedy is some kind of formally illiterate piece of confessional cinema. You can tell that Picardo’s debut originates from a precarious place with its budget partially scraped together using crowd-funding—in fact, Remedy is nearly a one-woman production: Picardo directed, produced, wrote the script, edited the film and even sang the song used for the opening credits. Her lofty filmmaking ambitions constantly find their way into the film’s structure and formal aspects, however. Remedy is structured as a series of S&M sessions that reflect the full spectrum of her everyday work experience: From outlandish, funny episodes of the sort that recently brought attention to Lene BErg’s great sex-work documentary “Kopfkino”, to encounters offering true personal affection and romantic potential, to sexual power games that gradually and apparently inevitably teeter toward actual danger.

The decision not to present these sessions as incidental to a concurrent story of psychological development , but as a crucial narrative tool, has far-reaching ramifications for the tension sustained by the movie. This is not just a film that wants to talk about sex and foregrounds sex for this reason—and even less so a film using its sexual content as a decorative element. Instead Cheyenne Picardo aims to turn various sexual constellations into the actual medium used to drive the narrative. Via the succession of johns and the sessions experienced by Remedy as either the dominant or submissive party, a definite narrative development can be detected. This type of narrativizing of the sex act itself represents the highest aspirations of the sex-film genre, and for long stretches Picardo is extraordinarily successful at pulling off this tight-rope act.

Admittedly, tightening some of its mid-section might have benefited the two-hour movie. But even this is mitigated by Picardo’s direction that seeks out not just atmospheric, but also varied and diverse images, including a penchant for split-screen mosaics. And besides, the waiting, the apparent killing of time, the enduring of uncertainty and repetition, silence and stillness, are integral parts of every successful sadomasochistic performance whose rhythms shape the deeper structure of Remedy. (Jochen Werner)

(Translation by Nina Gielen)

Interview with Neo of SMler.de

I was interviewed recently by Neo of SMler.de, a wonderful and comprehensive German kink blog. Since the interview was translated — in the process making me aware of wonderful German compound nouns like “Lacklederballettstiefeln” — I’ve included my original answers to her questions below.

What is your movie Remedy all about?

Remedy is an autobiographical fiction based on my time working as a staff (rather than independent) switch in a commercial BDSM dungeon in New York City. It’s my first feature film as producer, director, writer, and editor.

What kind of a woman is Mistress Remedy?

Unabashedly kinky, curious, independent and intelligent. But her tragic flaw, like mine, is her pride. She is type of person who behaves rationally until someone tells her she’s not allowed or not able to do something. Someone who doesn’t recognize when to cut bait and walk away.

But if I didn’t have this “flaw,” I’d never have had the courage to finish this film. So maybe it’s not such a defect after all.

What were your intention to produce that movie? (Why the topic BDSM?)

The intention was not to make a film about BDSM – there are other movies that would do that a lot better than this one. This is a film about profession fetish work. I had read memoirs by other dommes, and what struck me about them was how different their experiences had been from mine, how they sounded like sexual superheros. I found it hard to relate. The experience of a house domme is a very different thing than that of an independent. And I had not seen any writing from anyone who had done submissive sessions. Pro-sub appeared to be the stepchild of the industry, seldom discussed, occasionally denigrated. People who had done sub sessions were reluctant to admit it.

I had yet to read a memoir from the point of view of someone who, frankly, wasn’t cut out for the job, despite extensive personal exploration, and who had elected to do it. No trafficking, no coercion, just a choice.

And I was also eager to offer an antidote to films and television shows produced by people with no consultations with actual sex workers, let alone experience in the industry. People love to speak for the sex workers. I speak for myself.

How could you create that intense, offensive and honest movie? Is there any Story
behind the Scenes?

I couldn’t help it? This is what happens when someone digs deep into their history to tell a story. What comes out may not be exactly the way it happened, word for word; I couldn’t do that in two hours. But I couldn’t help but create something that feels genuine. It’s in the details. Emphasizing the shabbiness of the space, showing clean up after a session, focusing on interactions between people and not just on the spank or the flog. Allowing the actors to improvise rather than feeding them contrived dialogue, which releases the organic power dynamics in each scene. After the writing and shooting were complete, post-production created new opportunities to color the work with bits of honesty in the sound effects or choosing to expose the graininess of the prosumer video camera. Or maybe to even use a split screen… just because it seemed like a good idea. The process was very liberating, and the final film is raw and authentic in a way a glossy, high-budget set piece can’t be.

As for “the story behind the scenes,” there is a lot I chose not to include into the film. Some sessions were too cliche or too visually graphic. I now regret not taking more risks as far as what I showed, as almost every client (except the ones who saw me as a submissive) jerked themselves off at the end of the session, almost every client was completely naked, some of them wanted slut training or extreme CBT, or goldens. But at the time, I honestly was afraid of getting American sex workers in trouble. It takes next to nothing to set off a string of raids on houses in New York City, and dommes, subs, and switches really do have the privilege of most people not having the first clue about what actually goes on in session. Seriously, most folks, thanks to the media, think that dommes always stand six feet away from their completely mute and docile clients with a single tail, expertly balancing in patent leather ballet boots. Obviously, this couldn’t be further from the truth. If I had unlimited resources, I’d create a television show which was ultimately far more graphic, just to show the range of the industry, the people, and what’s required to do the work. I’d never run out of material.

But for this first film, I wanted to just tell my story, not fabricate other workers’ stories. Doing that with a film like this is very dangerous, and it’s a trap that a lot of directors don’t mind falling into — which is why there are so many dishonest portrayals of sex work and fetish out there in the world.

What do we learn about humans and their sexuality, when we have a look behind
curtains and into BDSM Studios?

First off that the two are not the same, nor are they mutually exclusive. “BDSM studios” or commercial dungeons are not the same as BDSM play spaces. Although professionals very often do occupy both spaces, especially when those pro’s are enjoying off-the-books personal time. This is not to say, however, that all BDSM sex workers are kinky at home, and I’ve met quite a few who are not.

How is Fetish and Underground Scene in New York? What is it all about?

I wish I knew. I’m something of a hermit since I started making REMEDY. My days of parading in fantastic outfits in clubs and working in house have transformed into my working very part-time with an independent domme and keeping my kinky playtime a little more insulated and my social time more intertwined with activists and artists. I miss the pageantry sometimes, though, and because of work I still have a closet full of wonderful outfits. I’m honestly quite interested in exploring how the scene works in Germany, considering how warm of a reception REMEDY and I have gotten there!

Is there anything you can remcommend somebody, who is new in the Fetish Scene?

Try not to set boundaries according to any rules that aren’t your own. A person’s sense of what is acceptable and unacceptable is personal, and no one else’s boundaries will quite match up with yours — especially in the BDSM scene. This is the reason why promoting consent culture is so important. Boundaries can be so fluid and delicate in the moment. Today’s yes is not tomorrow’s yes, and the more we make people understand that, the less likely it is for people to get hurt. Know yourself as well as possible.

Are there any new projects your working on? What will we see in the future from you?

Right now I’m having that wonderful problem of so many ideas, so many projects, but only so much time. I’m working on a couple of music videos that really excite me, as well as a series of short films about sex work from a more comedic, absurdist angle, but with the same amount of authenticity as REMEDY. As for my next feature, it’s written in a dozen different notepads and hopefully I will have a script by late spring. I can’t say much about it other than it will be a sexy dark comedy.

Yes, I was interviewed by Rolling Stone.

Not about my movie, per se, but about The Movie and The Book that is the primary reason I have way better SEO than I deserve. (Spoken like a true submissive.)

I chugged the book last weekend, and while the movie was pretty darned dreadful, the conversation I had with the reporter was fantastic. We chatted for over two hours, so I did not envy her having to first transcribe everything I rambled about and then distill it to what you see in this article.

Click here to read it!

One thing that didn’t make it in here is my questioning why RS and so many other publications are tapping people from the commercial BDSM industry for their takes on the film rather than asking civilians, who frankly would be far better positioned to critique this film. *I* happen to be kinky at home, but being a pro-domme is not necessarily indicative of personal bedroom preferences. I understand the mainstream misconception. If you want to interview a really good baseball player, you interview a professional baseball player. But this is not analogous in the case of kink. Good top does not mean pro top. Good top might mean pro bottom. Good pro might mean that once you leave work you never want to see a flogger again as long as you live. I hope that a few pubs start tapping just ordinary kinky people, and not necessarily Scene Celebrities either. While the reactions from kinky bloggers are definitely adding to the conversation in a much needed way, it would be nice if journalists realized that the act of interviewing a few of them would do a lot to up kink’s credibility.

I do regret that they had to paint me as an “Expert Domme.” I’m hardly an expert domme. In comparison to many out there, I’m probably hardly a mediocre domme. But I am kinky, and I did make a film about a kinky person who enters a career in commercial BDSM. (That MFA in Video Art & Photography and the BA in Film Theory and Crit probably didn’t hurt either.) So while I don’t believe I deserve the moniker in the sex work sense, I think I make up for it with my other qualifications.

(In other news, I say “like” far too frequently for a woman who’s about to turn 36.)

Writeup in Orion, a German erotic blog!

The finished film depicts a dark, dingy world. “Take a Walk on the Wild Side” as Lou Reed would say. – Miss Passion (Orion)

Click here to see the original blogpost by Miss Passion!

(Translation by Nina Gielen.)

Fetish and BDSM Film Tip: Remedy

The dominatrix “Mistress Remedy” is the subject of the fetish-themed film Remedy–a true-life story from the world of fetishes. “Traumkino Kiel” has provided some copy to whet your appetite:

In this New York-set movie the woman in question starts a job at a sex-work-studio under the moniker “Mistress Remedy”. As a dominatrix she has to cater to the varied wishes of her clientele and encounters many diverse strangers — repulsive freaks as well as interesting guys. While practicing her unique profession, every once in a while she worries something dangerous might happen. But sometimes she also gets the notion she could meet up privately with her clients outside the studio. But is a BDSM studio the right place to meet the man of your dreams?

Cheyenne Picardo has lived through everything that happens in the movie Remedy (in the exact same or in a similar fashion). The period of her life she spent working this job was extremely intense, with lasting effects until today, and in Remedy she processes it all. A lot of people helped her finance the film, among other things through crowdfunding (a means of collecting money from interested third parties). The finished film depicts a dark, dingy world. “Take a Walk on the Wild Side” as Lou Reed would say. The film premiered at New York’s Cinekink festival, where Remedy promptly garnered the audience choice award. But Germany is the first country to theatrically release the movie, starting January 22, 2015.

And so Remedy is linked to other independent movies currently adding diversity to the screen, such as Ulrich Seidl’s “Im Keller” and the critical escort-movie Top Girl out of Berlin.

REVIEW in Indiekino

REMEDY tells of an excess of intensity in the BDSM sessions, something that can not be simply shut off in daily life. – Indiekino

Here is a link to the review in the original German, where REMEDY gets contrasted with a German sex work film, TOP GIRL!

TOP GIRL & REMEDY
Sex and Economics

With Ulrich Seidl’s “IM KELLER,” Cheyenne Picardo’s “REMEDY” and Tatjana Turanskyj’s “TOP GIRL OR LA DÉFORMATION PROFESSIONELLE” there are currenty three films released in cinemas that deal with private and commercial sexual fantasies in very different ways. Seidl’s film shows BDSM people, two private and a professional couple, like exhibited objects in fairground booths, only to be seen by people with high school graduation – a kind of visual slumification in cinematic Louboutins. At least Seidl lets his protagonists talk. And especially the speech of a masochistic woman, naked and bound, about her precise differentiation between erotic submission and consensual pain opposed to violence and abuse, shows the high amount of self-reflexion that her sexual preference requires.

REMEDY and TOP GIRL on the other hand are about the commercial side of BDSM, but approach this subject with totally different perspectives. Cheyenne Picardo, director of REMEDY, worked in New York as a switch in a BDSM club, so she knows both the dominant and the submissive side. REMEDY is an autobiographic film about her experiences. Tatjana Turanskyj’s TOP GIRL, however, is more reminiscent of René Pollesch’s theater of discoure that was popular in the nineties. It is the second part of a planned trilogy about women and work. Even though it contains a plot about Helena, an unemployed actress (Julia Hummer) who works as an escort and fulfills the sexual desires of her clients, mostly the film is about materials, phrases and theses in an accented artificiality, often in parodic inversion. A lecture about cosmetic surgery is so much flavored with post-feministic rhetoric that only a feminist critique on self-optimisation remains. Relationships between people arise only on a material basis, it is all about money and work, with the money only being passed on concealed in envelopes. The men’s sexual fantasies are almost always about gender switching, like Judith Butler proposed it as a feminist strategy some years ago. In Turanskyj’s film, male submission fantasies are becoming fantasies again, in which men occupy a female position and move to a place from which they can fantasize about the subjugation of femininity, even if the formally assume the submissive position.

The girl is always below, down to the symbolic or real extinction. Whether TOP GIRL actually knows the world the film is about is ultimately irrelevant for the artistic concept. Economics is the cause for the disappearance of the female identity, and sex work is an intensified form of that, as it kills the body more quickly. The roles in this film describe positions, not characters. Helena and her mother represent two generations of false consciousness. The eldery because she follows an ideal of self-realization that turns out to be a market-compliant self-confinement, the younger one because she fails to recognize the relentless commodification and objectification of her body. She thinks of herself as a player in this game, but is only a screen for projection and agent of self-extinction. There are no personal, only business relationships between these two figures. It is a thesis film about which one can and should talk, but which does not have any aesthetically representative function and whose relationship to a pre-cinematic, pre-conceptual reality exists only theoretically and metaphorically.

Cheyenne Picardo’s film REMEDY is the opposite of TOP GIRL: a cinematic autobiography that is particularly interested in the relationship between the sex worker Remedy and her clients and the feelings associated with that. It is not because of financial distress that Remedy begins to work as a dominatrix and later as a submissive, but only out of personal interest in the BDSM scene of New York, particularly as someone challenges her: “You could never do that!” There is no sex in the club that Remedy works in – prostitution is illegal in New York, but BDSM clubs are allowed. The problem there is not the lack of intensity in the encounters, but an excess of it. Remedy is not hurt or deformed, but her experience move her so much that she decides to quit the job. Cheyenne Picardo shows some absurd events, like Remedy’s first session as a dominatrix, where she is supposed to give a mean guy a dental treatment, but instead gets him to fall asleep by giving him a foot massage. But more important are other encounters, for example when she meets a friendly flagellant and switches roles with him, resulting in a joyful competition about who can take the most blows.

Remedy likes the phyiscal aspects of her job, but not the psychic ones. She does not offer [sessions where she receives] “extreme humiliation” and she never strips naked, but when a man lets her dance being bound in front of him, this scenes stays with her for a long time. If Remedy is humiliated or aroused in that critical moment, the film does not tell, but it is not important anyway. REMEDY tells of an excess of intensity in the BDSM sessions, something that can not be simply shut off in daily life. Remedy and her clients come very close, but this closeness turns out to be an illusion.

Picardo made the film in a very direct and improvised style, citing the films of Mike Leigh as a role model, as well as the film WORKING GIRLS (1986) by avant-gardist Lizzie Borden (not to be confused with Melanie Griffith’s film WORKING GIRL from 1988). She puts the shabbiness of the BDSM studio, where there is always a mop in the corner and some piece of bondage equipment on the edge of tipping over, in contrast to the excitingly staged interactions betweens the people. Picardo said about REMEDY: “The film should do justice to the people in the scene, professional or not. I had to show the good and the bad things, without condemning sex work or the concept of kinky sex.”

And she succeeded with this very personal film.

While Driving

While driving to and from the post facility, aka Somewhere In New Jersey, I listen to podcasts. Ravenously. But I’m running out of inspirational, well recorded options. (I’m a bit of an audio snob. This is a fantastic quality to have when you are making independent film.)

Have any of you suggestions? Please post your suggestions…