Kissed

Kissed is explicitly about necrophilia and yet it is a beautiful, sensitive and even almost a respectable film. Lynne Stopkewich based her morbid, more than original story on a story she found in an anthology of erotica for women. (We So Seldom Look On Love by Barbara Gowdy). Stopkewich created a very sympathetic and attractive female necrophiliac as protagonist: Sandra Larson (an admirable role by Molly Parker) has been fascinated by death since childhood and cherishes cadavers of animals. As a student, she got a job with a funeral parlour as an assistant learning to lay out corpses. There she had her first necrophile experiences. At night she sneaks back into the mortuary where she embalms the bodies during the day. She prefers the bodies of good-looking young men, whom she rides with heavenly abandon. When the medical student Matt makes overtures, Sandra feels flattered, but her true passion is and remains her dead lovers.Despite the story and the theme, the film does not have a single element of trash or gore. Stopkewich found an almost serene way to portray sexual intercourse with dead bodies. Her preference for a female necrophiliac makes her comparable with Cindy Sherman whose Office Killer (see that film) also presents strong women who love death and also to a certain extent with Maria Beatty (see that film) who recorded her performances with very sexually aggressive women on film. (GjZ)