My Mistress is the story of a bored, horny teenage lad and the dominatrix he hooks up with, to the ultimate satisfaction of neither. Imagine inserting a character clad entirely in wetlook PVC into the Australian TV show Neighbours and you’re most of the way there.
Handsome young Charlie comes home from school one day to find his dad has hanged himself in the family garage. Mum was having an affair with dad’s best friend, it turns out, though why exactly dad did the deed we never quite find out.
The funeral comes and goes. Charlie is wracked with grief but not so wracked that he hasn’t by this point noticed sexy older French woman Maggie: her pout, her blond hair, her scarlet lipstick and her leopard-print top. What Charlie doesn’t know but very soon will is that Maggie is a dominatrix of the old school – the skintight outfit, the barked commands, the customers trussed up like roasting fowl.
What Charlie also doesn’t know is that Maggie is a mother with a child in care, and that one of her customers is the social worker looking after her case. Interesting.
Implausibly, after Charlie answers an advert for a gardener at Maggie’s big ramshackle house, they start a relationship of sorts, the fatherless son and the childless mother, one based on emotional need rather than sex, though that is always held out as a possibility by director Stephen Lance (who also came up with the story).
The sex is a tease in My Mistress, a come-on, a headline. The real story here is about emotional emptiness. Charlie and Maggie are both fragile, wounded, bereft individuals and Lance frames them often starkly separated from their environments. The interiors of Maggie’s house are largely empty. Charlie’s house – much more suburban – is also carefully framed to emphasise negative space.
As the horny 16-year-old who needs to masturbate in the shower at home after visiting Maggie, Harrison Gilbertson makes a good Charlie, a smalltown dude in a cap-sleeve T-shirt attempting to summon up the sort of savoir-faire that impresses an older woman. As Maggie, there’s Emmanuelle Béart, around 50 years old and in the sort of shape to confound the calendar, a sparrow in distress. They are both very good in their roles, separately and, crucially, together, he a variation on the whingeing teenager, she the damaged goods, characters in search of salvation, or something.
Unlike, say, Dogs Don’t Wear Pants – the Finnish movie going at the subject of the dominatrix in a more transactional way – My Mistress has the anglophone view of sex, as something delightful but a bit smutty, fuel for teenage wank fantasies and so on. But at bottom the agenda is the same – emotional connection, filling a need with sex standing in for something more emotionally profound.
There’s a nice scene early on when Charlie is in front of the mirror getting ready to meet Maggie. He musses his hair, pushes his cool shades up his nose and tilts his head just so. It’s just a moment but it’s pure Alain Delon and Gilbertson does it well. But would a suburban Australian teenager know who Delon is? Charlie has a poster of The Kiss by Robert Doisneau on his wall so knows his French culture – this is Lance getting his riposte in to smartass quibbles like that.
More little moments like that would have been welcome, because this can get quite fraught, a touch breast-beaty but it’s not the ridiculous nonsense it might have been. That’s probably down to the two leads, Gilbertson the plausible 16-year-old (he’s actually about 20) and Béart resisting the urge to go large as Maggie, whether at work whipping her customers or in the quieter moments with Charlie. Nicely done.
My Mistress – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2024
