Mope - NZIFF

I’m in a bit of predicament. I loved Mope. I think. However, I can’t just straight up recommend it, because Mope is NOT a film for everyone. It is batshit insane. If I just tell everyone I know to go see it without telling them what it’s about and what kind of film it is, I’m liable to lose friendships. But I also think that if you are going to see it, it’s best to go in blind, knowing as little as possible.

So, what do I do?

Mope is about Steve Driver (Nathan Stewart-Jarret) and Tom Dong (Kelly Sry), two absolute bottom of the barrel, lowest budget possible, fetish porn actors (a.k.a. “mopes”). The film opens on a group of a dozen or more men in a small room, wearing only underwear, bathed in red light. Most of the men have their hands down their pants, rubbing themselves, and it soon becomes clear that they’re there to film a bukkake scene. If you don’t know what that means, perhaps this film is not for you. Or maybe it is? I don’t know. Google at your own risk. If you do know what ‘bukkake’ means, you know what kind of film you’re in for. This is where the film starts - and it only gets crazier from there. It’s raw, filthy, at times hilarious, at times horrific. A film full of sex, sweat, and insanity.

Oh, and it’s a true story.

If you like your films to have the darkest of black comedy, filmed in bold, stylized ways, feature strange characters and situations, and you’re ok with a film taking you to a legitimately disturbing place, then stop reading and go see Mope. It’s a wild ride and going in as blind as possible will make that ride all the wilder. If you’d like to know more before you decide if you want to take the ride, read on.

Mope is Lucas Heyne’s directorial debut and he spent over five years working on the movie, including two years of researching not only the true events the film is based on, but the wider world of mopes. He visited many porn sets and met a lot of people who knew the real Steve and Tom, many of whom appear in the movie as versions of themselves. Heyne got a wealth of material from Steve’s father, including thousands of emails between the two of them. All this research was put in to the film. Sometimes literally. A lot of the dialogue in the film is lifted directly from Heyne’s research.

The filmmaking itself is rough and raw. Mope manages to feel like what you would expect a low rent fetish porn set would feel like. Grimy. Sticky. Gross. The cinematography, production design, sound, it all adds to the filthy feeling that permeates the film. You can almost smell it. And Heyne does not shy away from any of it. His camera is right there, watching everything in a handheld style that sometimes feels almost documentary like, at other times like some insane fever dream using vivid, bold colours.

The one thing that Heyne does leave out is full frontal male nudity. At first, I found this a bit conspicuous. For a film about porn, and so brutally honest in so many ways, it was a strange omission. But after some thought I realised that showing full frontal male nudity in a film about porn would quickly raise some problems, excuse the pun. Not only physical, but obvious ethical questions abound. After all, at what point does this film about porn, just become porn itself? And what actors are going to want to be in this film?

Heyne gets around this problem by filming a lot of the sex scenes in very uncomfortable close ups. There is a very intense sex scene towards the end of the film that is told entirely in close ups and it’s among the most devastating scenes I’ve seen in a while.

The film is centered around Stewart-Jarret and Sry’s performances, with Brian Husky third on the bill as sleazy head of the ‘studio’, Eric, but to be honest trying to appraise the performances in this film is tricky. They’re all good… I think. The film, and the performances, start out as this bizarre, black comedy, outrageously in your face. But then it transitions in to something far darker and more disturbing, and I was so consumed with thoughts of “What the fuck?!” that it was hard to judge whether the performances were “good” or not. I think they were. Tonya Cornelisse definitely deserves praise. She has a small role, but it’s basically the largest female role in the film. She’s outstanding.

I honestly still don’t quite know how I feel about Mope. I know it caused a reaction in me. A strong one. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. But is it a good film? Is it a brutally honest and confronting profile of a seedy part of society? A look in to the mindset of the seriously mentally ill and the fine line between dreams and delusions? Or is it just exploitative shock cinema? I think the director had honest intentions; you don’t just put five years of your life in to a piece of sensationalist shock cinema. But intention doesn’t really matter as much as what you actually end up making.

It was just so insane that I don’t know what to make of it.