Put On Your Raincoats | Soft Places (Lease, 1978)
This is the fourth Maria Lease directed film Iāve seen so far, and it has some of the better qualities Iāve come to expect from her work. As a porno itās creatively realized and often stylish, peaking with a scene where the heroine awakes to a roomful of fog and a disembodied penis (achieved with a black bodysuit worn by the male performer; eerie synths and wind noises add to the illusion). And it takes what could be male fantasies and filters them through the perspective of her female protagonist. Here, the protagonist is a recently widowed actress whose cruel husband left his estate to her on the condition she goes through a specific sequence of sexual scenarios. On one hand, this is an obvious excuse to go through an escalating series of sex scenes, and the movie certainly does that. But the whole time the movie challenges our enjoyment of these scenes with the complex feelings of the heroine, whose apprehension about sex and mixed feelings about her husbandās cruelty conflict with her growing desire for sexual agency. The heroine is played by Annette Haven, whose high class veneer is effective in evoking this internal struggle. We hear her husband calling her āfrigidā, and maybe thatās an unfair characterization, but Haven nails that sense of apprehension while granting her character a certain dignity.
All that being said, because Iāve become so used to the tenderness and compassion that Lease has brought so reliably to her films, that I was let down by this one in one respect. In one scene, Haven masturbates the changeroom of a clothing store in view of another customer, who proceeds to masturbate as well and gets jumped by an excited plus sized woman. This is played as a punchline. In a later scene, Haven visits a working class bar (the kind where they have two kinds of wine, the red and the white) and captures the attention of most of the man in the establishment, but also draws the scorn of a pair of older prostitutes unhappy that theyāre losing customers. These characters are also presented as the butt of a joke. One of the prostitutes is given a scene, but this plays less like something youāre supposed to get off on than something youāre supposed to gawk at. Iām not going to pretend Iāve never laughed at this kind of humour elsewhere, but it feels uncharacteristically glib and dismissive in Leaseās filmography. In another scene, Haven visits a āwomenās clubā thatās essentially a brothel, and a hostess explains to her the variety of services they provide before being revealed to be a transwoman. Unlike the aforementioned two scenes, this character is at least presented to be desirable, but the movie strangely never follows through on including her in a sex scene. There are narrow standards of beauty at play that the movie is not divorced from, but I think it would have been bolder to have presented all of these auxiliary characters as desirable and included them more equitably in Havenās sexual journey.
As it is, I did like the movie, but the sour taste left in my mouth by the handling of those characters means that this is probably my least favourite film from Lease Iāve seen yet.
