Monika Treut | Die Jungfrauenmaschine (Virgin Machine) / 1988

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by Douglas Messerli

 

Monika Treut (screenwriter and director) Die Jungfrauenmaschine (Virgin Machine) / 1988

 

Caught up in sexual relationships between her half-step-brother, Bruno (Marcelo Uriona) and her heavy-set thuggish boss Heinz (Gad Klein)—trapped as you might put it between incest and heterosexual disgust—you can well comprehend why Dorothee Müller (Ina Blum) is unhappy. Imbued with traditional notions of womanhood (“women are the empty receptacles to the male urge to propagate”), she is working as a journalist on the “secret to romantic love.” As a romantic herself, she interviews a hormone specialist (Peter Kern) who discusses the bodily secretion before and during sex of chemicals such as oxytocin, noradrenaline, and dopamine while appearing to be unwrapping a sausage he is about to eat as if were cutting away the stitching on a recently circumcised penis. Like most of the males in this movie he is quite disgusting.

     Dorothee even attempts to communicate with a female chimpanzee to explore her DNA commitments to raising and caring for her babies until hormones overcome her and she seeks out the male pack.

      Understandably, however, she feels her research is getting nowhere, and finally decides to pack up and travel to the USA, in particular San Francisco to where her mother has escaped years earlier—demanding that Dorothee kill her father after she left. Bruno also delivers a message that her mother would finally like to see her.

      Strangely, instead of the male gay bastion by which we define the city today, Dorothee imagines it as an amazon-like community of mostly woman who control everything. To her great disappointment, the women she meets at first is just as crude and mean as the males she has left behind. The landlord at her mother’s apartment announces that she’s owned five-months back rent, and the mother has taken off to god-knows-where. Dorothee’s questions lead to a spew of hateful abuse on the landlady’s part. A black woman standing nearby suggests she saw Dorothee’s mother leaving in a cab, but the girl’s eager desire to find out further information leads even that confidant to order her to back off.

       Have no fear, the doe-eyed innocent (at moments a near look-alike for an early Liza Minelli) as we soon discover this traveler to her own Oz to be, is—as even she describes herself to be— “all ears,” eager to listen to any stories that might come her way. Renting a room in a sleazy San Francisco boarding house, Dorothee sees an ad for a woman who promises to solve all sexual difficulties and immediately telephones, leaving her number.

      Soon after on the beach she encounters fellow German emigree Dominque (Dominique Gaspar) who communicating in German takes the newcomer under her wing. And in another walk down the hill-city’s yellow brick roads, Dorothee comes upon a sex-expert, Susie Sexpert (Susie Bright) attempting to lure men and most women into a female strip show. Susie is particularly keen on encouraging her fellow females to visit the strip-tease shows, and gives the eager Dorothee a  long lecture on the various tools of the trade, including overly-large breasts which keep one stripper working long after the usual age of retirement.

       Soon after, Dorothee borrows a bicycle from Dominique and speeds off around town to engage in the new venues, mostly lesbian, suggested by her friends. Her eager races through the city cannot help but remind us of the New Wave films, in particular Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) and Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), as Dorothee ventures into lesbian clubs, joins dykes on bikes, and visits various other lesbian establishments.

       Susie also has a large collection of dildoes which she shows off and describes to her new friend. Almost immediately after, Dorothee attends a show of the drag king, Romona, whose male attire attracts an eager lesbian audience as she employs various tools and a bottle of beer that, when placed near her vagina, foams up and over convincingly to suggest male ejaculation.

       Dorothee is particularly interested in Romona, and soon after makes a date with her, excited about their impending meeting at a bar.

       Their encounter might be described as the centerpiece of the film. Ramona takes Dorothee in a stretch-limousine to Fishermen’s Wharf where they snap pictures of themselves together and have them transferred on to t-shirts. After drinks in the back seat of the limo, they enjoy dinner at El Rio, finally ending up back in Dorothee’s room where they have some of the most beautifully filmed lesbian sex since Chantal Ackerman’s somewhat more robust female coupling in Je, Tu, Il,  Elle (1974).

      Totally overwhelmed by the entire experience, Dorothee imagines herself in love and in ecstasy simultaneously, until Romana rudely awakens her to tell her that the price for their get-together—on sale because of how much she likes Dorothee—comes to $500, an extraordinary cost for 1989.

       What is such a guileless romantic to do but to simply lay back and let out a hearty series of guffaws? We love Dorothee even more for her naivete.

       Far from souring her on the lesbian world she has now entered, Dorothee engages in an amateur strip night, closed to all males including the King of Porn himself, and becomes even closer to Dominque and her female friend, the three of them dancing in delight as they prepare a dinner for themselves.

      Soon after, Dorothee gathers together all her German family and previous lovers’ photos and bicycles to Golden Gate Park, where tears them into pieces throwing into the bay. She has found a new home and world that at least promises to meet her romantic expectations.

       Dorothee’s romp through life to discover a new world of delight is both extremely educative to audiences of the day and so much fun that it’s nearly impossible not to love Monika Treut’s slightly punk lesbian and feminist Die Jungfrauenmaschine. As the reviewer for the 2017 Berlinale screening of the film noted, Virgin Machine is "open, cheerful and with a lot of fun; the women in the film go through life and are not only an inspiration for Dorothee Müller, but for all modern women."

       Today the film has become something of a cult favorite.

 

Los Angeles, December 15, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2022).