Sven Spur | Eden / 2020

count me out

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sven Spur (screenwriter and director) Eden / 2020 [17 minutes]

 

Let me begin this essay by repeating what anyone who has made their way through the pages of the several volumes of My Queer Cinema will already know: I have nothing against pornography or with sexual cruising, and I have embraced both, porn as a viewer and sexual cruising (in my youth) as an active participant.

     Yet, this short film which borders on porn and concerns sexual cruising leaves me rather bored. Perhaps it is because the actors—given rather meaningless character names that matter little in the “story”—Wolf (Mustaf Ahmeti), Benny (Vincent van Driessche), Dirk Couvent (Philip), and Ludovic Harnais (Lu)—simply don’t attract me; they seem all at the edges of S&M, not my cup of tea. But it is also because the soft porn of this film (only one glimpse of a flaccid penis, no semen spewed) is not terribly sexually exciting. Even TV series have shown more sexually arousing images.

      Belgian director Sven Spur has his figures reveal a lot of butt and engages his actors in a great many anal fucks, but provides the viewer with very little in the way of sensual lust. If this is Eden, Adam was lucky to have escaped. Here it’s all mirrors and colors, red being the dominate one, perhaps suggesting, rather puritanically, that in Wolf’s endless sexual searches we are approaching hell.

     But even so, it’s all rather safe sex. Wolf wears a condom, as presumably do the others; and at one point he romps down the street in the rain with one of his meet-ups as if he were a young pup in love. Being a Wolf, however, he also howls.

     Perhaps the major reason this film leaves me cold is that it is simply boring. Wolf meets someone in the park for sex; he sits soaking in a spa pool waiting for Benny to swim over to him and encourage him into sex; he sits in a room of mirrors where he fucks Benny; he cleans out his butt in the bathtub; he has sex in a bedroom; and he ends up in a sling where he gets fucked by another. And that’s all there is. Nothing is made of these events, except perhaps a bit of jealousy by Benny as he watches his former partner get fucked, rather longingly and not as a voyeur.

     In so many gay films attractive men and cute boys have a much more active and sensual love life. Wolf, his ears and fingers stuffed with rings, seems on the hunt for something which he can’t quite reveal to us, even if he presumably finds what he’s seeking. Good for Wolf, but leave me out of this record of his acts. Well, in fact, the director already has.

 

Los Angeles, January 11, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).