No Spanish Fly Necessary | Isabella Rossellini indulges in a little X-rated entomology in Green Porno.
GREEN PORNO
Directed by Isabella Rossellini. Starring Isabella Rossellini. Now playing online.
3 1/2 stars
Last year, The Sundance Channel in the States decided to start developing projects for computers, iPods, and cellphones—the so-called “third screen.” (Movie theatres are the first screen and TV sets are the second screen of the 21st-century media landscape.)
The content would need to be short, colourful, and high-impact. It’s a simple mandate, and yet somehow it led to Isabella Rossellini in a bee costume hopping around a soundstage shouting, “My penis has broken off!”
That scene is one of the highlights of Green Porno, a delightfully odd series of eight short films (very short—they range from 90 seconds to just under three minutes) in which Rossellini describes the peculiar sexual habits of various common bugs, insects, and... er... whatever snails and earthworms are. Their visual style recalls an elementary school pageant or a children’s pop-up book come to life: bright, primary colours, with sets and costumes largely made of construction paper and cardboard.
Everything looks deliberately artificial: the sky is obviously a bedsheet with fluffy white “clouds” stapled onto it, Rossellini’s “compound eyes” are obviously goggles covered with eye-shaped cardboard cutouts, and when Rossellini, playing a housefly, shows herself crawling on the ceiling, she’s obviously just crawling on the floor with the camera turned upside down.
It always used to seem strange that Rossellini, an internationally renowned beauty and the daughter of Hollywood royalty, was so willing to put herself at the disposal of oddball directors like David Lynch and Guy Maddin. But Green Porno makes the explanation obvious: she’s every bit as crazy as they are! But it’s a lovable, homespun sort of craziness—the craziness of that dotty spinster aunt we all have, the one with all those weird old clothes and antique gadgets up in the attic.
It’s as if one of those nutty women who love dressing up their cats in homemade costumes had a side career as a top fashion model and knew a lot of New York gallery owners and theatre designers.
Rossellini brings a childlike sense of make-believe to these shorts that’s absolutely perfect for the material. She’s completely unembarrassed to dress up in ridiculous spandex costumes or deliver the strangest information straight into the camera: “If I were an earthworm, I would pee from each of my segments,” “If I were a dragonfly, I would find a female, grab her body, and clean her vagina to make sure she only had my babies,” “If I were a snail, I would twist my body to fit inside my shell; my anus would end up on top of my head... unfortunately.”
She’s particularly funny in the “housefly” segment, yawning with mock alarm when someone tries to swat her with a newspaper, snacking on a giant plate of spaghetti, and then enthusiastically humping a giant female fly from the rear. “I have sex several times a day!” she boasts. “Any opportunity, any female!”
The more alien the creature she’s impersonating, the sexier Rossellini gets. In the “earthworm” segment, she’s deliciously serene as she describes the joys of hermaphroditic sex, and when she successfully passes her fertilized clitellum over her head, allowing a new litter of babies to hatch, she looks like the most radiant woman on earth.
And words cannot describe the X-rated climax of the “snail” segment, in which Rossellini is both penetrator and penetratee, sadist and masochist, top and bottom, man and woman. “Sadomasochism excites me,” she coos—Dorothy Vallens and Frank Booth from Blue Velvet both subsumed into one small, slimy, ecstatic organism.
Besides being hilarious, Green Porno makes the world seem just a little more wondrous—who knew such perversities were taking place right under our noses? I don’t think I’d want to trade places with any of these insects, though. Well, all right, maybe I’d be willing to be a firefly, but only if I could be guaranteed that the female flashing back at me would turn out to be as cute as Isabella Rossellini. And that she wouldn’t eat me.
