By Keri O’Shea
Almost the moment the opening credits roll on Jon ‘Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer’ Knautz’s newest film, Goddess of Love, we can see that our female lead, Venus (Alexis Kendra) is something of a culture vulture. Learning to speak French? Check. Ballet? Check. Piano, yep; drug addiction which makes her look intermittently wasted but doesn’t altogether detract from her overall attractiveness – you betcha. Still, perhaps she’s a finishing school drop out, or for whatever reason, be it down to drugs or something else, she’s also stripping by night to make ends meet. This… doesn’t seem to be her forte, to be fair.
She’s given a few handy pro tips on how to empty wallets by fellow dancer Chanel (the wonderful Monda Scott, and someone, somewhere please give her a starring movie role) but for all of the sage advice, it doesn’t go well. The first customer she gets after the pep talk tells her she looks like his dead wife, and somehow they still end up at dinner together. They seem to hit it off, too – professional distance be damned – and start seeing each other. Venus can cook but one meal and that’s pasta, but what the hell. It might just be love. Young lovers need the carbs.
Months pass, however, and with them goes the honeymoon period; one day, Venus sees another woman’s name pop up on Brian’s phone, some old friend called Christine (who also models for his photography). She copes with this as admirably as any nervy, drug-addicted and insecure female ever has, i.e. not at fucking all, and so when Brian begins going incommunicado altogether for days at a time, it’s clearly getting under Venus’s skin: she becomes obsessive, paranoid, her mental state ever more fragile. Is Brian cheating on her? In getting to the bottom of the question, Goddess of Love offers us abundant nudity, red wine from the bottle, and puking.
I sound like I’m really down on this film, but to tell the truth – I’m not. Okay, on one level it was a surprise, considering the last thing I saw by this director was very much in the ‘horror comedy’ category, and this is neither a horror nor a comedy. In fact, I’m struggling to place it in a genre at all, which means little in terms of reviewing it per se, but may affect its likelihood of finding an appreciative audience. Market it as a Neighbor style horror and risk criticism of its largely bloodless nature, sell it as a psychological thriller and get it in the neck because it’s just too crass and horrific in places (for a woman who seems to only turn up to work a handful of times during the film, incidentally, Kendra spends a lot of the time in various states of partial or full undress which can look a bit, well, odd; if that has now encouraged you to check out the film for boobs alone then I posit that no one looks good sitting naked on a toilet).
Despite some misgivings about the genre aspect, though, there are many things to enjoy here. In terms of how the film looks, it’s really very good. The production values here are rock solid; it’s well-miked, well-lit and well-shot, with an evident eye for effective angles and reveals. The lead actors aren’t massively at ease in some places, but give Kendra some proper flip-outs to work with and she shows she can do a great deal with it – ditto Elizabeth Sandy (playing Christine) who goes from lady-who-lunches to bat-wielding harpy in a heartbeat. And then, in some ways it’s refreshing that the film deviates from one of its possible courses; I’d assumed this delicate and naive stripper would be victim to some sadist who just happens to frequent strip clubs; thankfully, this isn’t the case. But my god does this film play on the worst stereotypes of female behaviour, too (and yes, I know stereotypes have one foot in truth, even if we might not like to admit it). Venus is positively painful to watch, with the constant sending of unread texts, the clinginess, the determination to throw everything into a short-term relationship with, well, with a bit of a dick. I understand that what follows for her and for the plot is rooted in this behaviour, but still – it’s frustrating stuff, and the ol’ ‘unhinged female whose attempt at a relationship acts as a touchpaper for her descent into madness’ has been done elsewhere.
In fact, if I was going to compare this film to anything, it’d probably be Lucky McGee’s May (2002): the earlier film’s tagline ‘Be careful – she might just take your heart’ seems to be echoed in Goddess of Love’s own ‘Be careful who you get close to’. But although you sometimes find yourself rooting for Venus – flaws and all – in the same way you find yourself rooting for Bettis’s May, Goddess of Love as a film ultimately lacks the shock and sympathy I felt at the end of May. Whether this is because the depth to Venus’s character is signposted so lightly and early, because there’s more of an attempt to maintain overt sexuality in Venus, or even because the conclusion takes one more step into a tried and tested exploration of psychosis is something to be debated.