Sex Offence
I just can’t with this.
The Chronicles of Libidoists
Director: Yang Ya-che • Writers: Yang Ya-che, Chiang Yu-chu
Starring: Wu Kang-ren, Liu Chu-ping, Alisia Liang, Will Or
Taiwan • 1hr 46mins
Opens Hong Kong Sep 26 • III
Grade: D
The Chronicles of Libidoists | 破浪男女, erm, chronicles the sexploits of four lonely souls in Taipei, trying to forge meaningful bonds with another person, any person, through freaky sex. The souls include a blocked “second-rate” writer, identified only as Single Dad (Wu Kang-ren, Abang Adik) with a brat of a teenaged daughter and a bitter ex-wife. He’s having a loosey-goosey, no-strings fling with a trans cop, Lu (Liu Chu-ping, 18×2 Beyond Youthful Days), who feels like “half a woman” and so is trying to sex her way to “true” womanhood. Her best friend, Queenie (relative newcomer Alisia Liang Xiang-hua) is some kind of high-powered bizniz chick with a shitty fiancé, who needs to let her freak flag fly every so often with a little kinbaku. She usually does that with her BDSM dom – no shit – Überdick (Will Or Wai-lam, The Goldfinger, Drifting) a sex worker masquerading as Leather Man from American Horror Story. They weave in and out of each other’s lives having bad sex, spouting bullshit dialogue and philosophising about the nature of love. Or something.
Explicitly dull
The Chronicles of Libidoists has been something of a dirty hit in Taiwan, and sure enough is being marketed for its titillation potential here; those giant Cat III posters you’re seeing in the MTR is supposed to drum up attention for all the (allegedly snipped) T&A. But unfortunately it’s not all T&A, because The Bold, the Corrupt and the Beautiful and Orz Boyz director Yang Ya-che (co-writing with Chiang Yu-chu) decided that what Libidoists needed was a half-cocked (ooooh, rimshot, please… shit! I said “rim”) Little Mermaid metaphor about transformation, identity and connection. From jump Libidoists makes not a lick of sense, it’s self-indulgent, self-important and, above all, it’s unsexy. Have we learnt nothing from Fifty Shades of Grey?
The muddled story, such as it is, dishes out dribs and drabs about the main players, revealing their various traumas, psychoses and vulnerabilities as a way to explain their sexuality – because apparently anyone into bondage has to be fucked in the head – and intense loneliness, which in turn drives their “deviant” sexuality. When genuine emotion rears its head in the core relationships it’s then that things get weird for our horned up quartet. Such deep thoughts.
The Chronicles of Libidoists comes from the same tradition of mainstream movies in Asia trying to the push the envelope on screen sexuality as road to psychological insight; think Im Sang-soo’s A Good Lawyer’s Wife, Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution and Tsai Ming-liang’s The Wayward Cloud. The difference being that all of those had something significant to say. It’s embarrassing how hard Yang and the film try to be edgy and searingly insightful and fumble the ball every step of the way. The attempt to turn the mermaid fairy tale on its head is clumsy Symbolism & Metaphor 101, and it has what is possibly the most irritating text message visual device yet put to film – any film. Not only is it stupid it actively messes with the narrative (hahahaha) flow. What really sticks in the craw, though, is how it’s not a poorly made film, and the actors are a long way from checked out. Hell, they’re way more checked in than I was come the 20-minute mark. But there’s a limit to the volume of pretension any one person can take. When Borderlands landed in theatres in August it shot to the top of the list of contenders for worst films of 2024. Well, it’s going to have to step aside for The Chronicles of Libidoists. It takes a truly special level of ineptitude to make a bunch of attractive people showing some skin and engaging in a ton of sex dull as dishwater.