Sexual Dependency
Sexual Dependency
| 31 August 2003 (USA)
Sexual Dependency Trailers

A poor girl, a rich stud, a university student and a model -- nothing in common, except the desire to experience true intimacy. Their stories unfold and overlap as each becomes victim to their own sexual dependencies, self-perceptions and illusions. Thematically structured around issues of femininity, masculinity, virginity, rape and sexuality, each teen struggles to make sense of their own identity, reaching for ideals that represent everything they feel they are supposed to be, but are not.

Reviews
BroadcastChic

Excellent, a Must See

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Huievest

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

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PiraBit

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

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Francene Odetta

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

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groggo

I think this could have been a good film, but, as others have mentioned, the split-screen 'style' (?) is incredibly annoying over 100-odd minutes of watching, or, in this case, watching TWICE. That adds up to 200-odd minutes of watching five different stories, all while distracting you with camera gimmickry.In the mid-1960s, a graphic designer from Toronto, Ontario, Canada named Chris Chapman created the split-screen idea for a short film on the Province of Ontario for the provincial government. It was a sensation at Expo '67 in Montreal, and was such a novel idea that Toronto director Norman Jewison (and others) used it in 1960s films.The idea, predictably, went nowhere. It was trendy, had flair, but was not sustainable over the length of an entire film. Jewison used it sparingly in The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), and it annoyed critics even then. And here, almost 40 years later, we have a director who thinks it would be a great idea to try it again, this time (unlike Jewison, who was far more judicious) over the ENTIRE STRETCH of a movie.I was astounded that this was done. It defies basic physical laws. The human eye just cannot catch up with a blizzard of jump cuts (and that's what they really amount to) over a feature-length. Instead of intensifying the drama, it instead made me truly irritated.Repeat: I THINK this could have been a good film. Or is that films, as in plural?

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sycul

Sexual Dependency is an interesting movie, very different from the movies produced in Hollywood. However I agree with the user commenting that "it could have been a good movie". Unfortunately it has many deficiencies. One of the biggest one is that the small little stories are quite scarce and non-realistic, e.g. the first one and the last one. I don't understand the director/writer why he changed the location of the last scene... Why did he move the story from Bolivia to USA? This gave me the impression that the stories are completely different and they won't have any meeting point, or anything in common (then at the end it turns out they have). The filming technique is also quite tiresome. You see two screens, sometime having completely different action in one than in the other. And as the movie is shot is Spanish, you have to keep an eye on the subtitle. So it's really hard and tiring to follow both screens. Sometimes I had the feeling that I'm bored, at some point (after the second scene) I thought I should stop watching the movie.

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Dejhan_Tulip

This movie is very good. A bunch of reasons make me say this. First of all, I am a person who has been around many countries in South America (i.e. Latin America) and I can very well relate everything that this movie showed. The movie is based on a reality that Bolivia, specially Santa Cruz (the city), lives day by day. This reality shows how people think, and how very small societies can play important and determinant roles in people's way of thinking, way of acting, and even sexuality (title of the movie.) The split screen is a very good effect. I have to admit that it is weird at the beginning, b/c first of all i have never watched a movie like that--with a split screen--and i am pretty sure many people haven't either. After 10 to 15 minutes you start to realize why the director did this, and you start to understand how he focus different things, at different times, for different purposes. Its just like real life; you just don't go around looking for one thing at a time, the effect of multi-focusing gives the movie a special taste, and most importantly, it gives the movie a very realistic taste. The movie ending is one of the best ones that i have seen in my entire life, totally unexpected, totally shocking, and makes you think about every single thing that you saw in the movie. I would strongly recommend it. Trust me, just see it, with an open mind, and you will like it. 10/10

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j-dewolff

This is not an easy movie to watch. Not only is the topic rather heavy, but the way the director shows the images is in the beginning very disturbing and tiresome: you constantly see two images at the same time, like the screen is split in a left and a right half! Sometimes it's two totally different images from two different story-lines, at other times it's just two different camera-angles of the same going-ons. At first I thought it would eventually turn to one image, or it would just get split-up again when there was some specific reason for it. But when it dawned on me that this would go on throughout the whole 105 minutes, it almost made me turn the thing off. Luckily I didn't, because gradually your eyes and brain apparently get used to this, and I have to say: the movie itself is really good!! It was advertised on my DVD-box as some sort of sequel to Kids or Ken Park movie, which I think doesn't justify it. Sure, it's got the same sense of documentary, young actors going about as if they're not acting at all, and camera's wavering about, and it's as candid in the way the different stories are told and shown. But it's a lot less superficial, you seem to get more into the characters of the persons, which at least enables you a little bit to comiserate and care for them. It's about some 5 young kids who all have reasons for frustrated feelings about sex and sexuality. Some in a very simple way, like the young village-girl with the raving strict father, who's dying for her first experience. Or the young virgin guy who gets forced by his drunk and roaring friends to visit a prostitute. In others it's more complicated: hidden homosexual feelings in a macho latino, or coping with the experience of a rape. The different story lines are cleverly woven into eachother, in a very natural way (witch is helped of course by the splitting of the screen) and somehow I didn't even notice it much when the story brought us to a Spanish or an American spoken scene. Of course you're not to expect any happy ending with this kind of bare, painfully honest movies, and the one here is equally depressing, just giving you the hope that everyone will somehow have learned something from his or her bad experiences. Maybe that's my main criticism: there's very little room for a smile, it's maybe all a bit too pitch-black. However: absolutely worth while. 8 out of 10.

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