Guardami

Based on the premise, I thought Guardami was going to be tragedy porn meets actual porn. As it turns out, the film didn’t even deliver on the tragedy.

Nina loves her life. She works as a porn star and sex show performer. In her spare time, she goes to sex parties and maintains an open relationship with her girlfriend, Cristiana. But then, a medical diagnosis intrudes on Nina’s life. Nina is diagnosed with cancer. This affects her job and her personal relationships. She distances herself from Cristiana as she begins chemo. Instead, Nina meets a man named Flavio going through chemo himself. Their cancer connection and new relationship make up much of the back half of the film.

Guardami is one of the most explicit movies I’ve seen and almost certainly the most explicit thing I’ve reviewed for this site. There are numerous unsimulated sex acts in the film. Clearly, Guardami is trying to push that boundary. This premiered at Venice film festival and gets that prestigious laurel logo at the start of the film. That film festival prestige is doing a lot of heavy lifting in me qualifying this as a “film” at all. Usually once the sex acts are unsimulated, that officially becomes porn. But Guardami is art, you see! All that explicit sex isn’t just titillation, it’s supposed to make you think!

Okay, Guardami. Your sexually explicit scenes have made me think. And what I think is that this is one of the least interesting ways to push a cinematic boundary. This mixing of art and porn only becomes though-provoking if you don’t also see porn as a medium of art. Personally, I’m more interested in porn becoming more cinematic than cinema becoming more pornographic. Guardami thinks it’s shocking because it shows you stuff that yes, you would rarely see in a movie. But there’s a whole other industry happy to meet that demand. It’s an industry that Guardami probably thinks it’s superior to. I’m tired of cinematic provocation via explicit sex. What is it trying to say? That humans have and enjoy sex? That humans use technology to watch or perform sex involving an audience? Groundbreaking statements.

The cancer element is way more underplayed than I wanted or expected. Nina’s cancer diagnosis affects her life, but half of the effects are because her diagnosis introduces her to Flavio. You may not be surprised to learn I am not thrilled about a narrative where a woman breaks up with her girlfriend and then takes up with a man. Otherwise, Nina’s response to her diagnosis is to largely ignore it, pretend like nothing’s changed and still have a lot of sex as a profession and for free. It’s not even like this is a bad character choice. We’ve established she’s a very sexual woman. It makes sense she would also see this part of her life through this lens. But I still question how much cancer does a woman need to have before the camera will stop filming close-ups of her wide open pussy, you know?

I thought the movie was going to kill Nina. A queer woman who fucks a lot and then dies. Perfect and expected, right? They don’t. Maybe that’s subversive or progressive. Guardami fails to make it feel that way. It’s Flavio who becomes the tragic, terminal figure. This puts our female protagonist in the role of caregiver instead. Plus, terminal cancer isn’t sexy. Nina loses a bit of weight and gets some sort of chemotherapy pixie cut. But anything else might potentially interfere with her ability to have sex with a man on top of a projection screen showing her having sex with this man. Guaradmi is so bad it makes we wish they buried their gays. Because at least then, their protagonist would have more of an arc and the movie would have more reasons to get away from the topic it has already covered exhaustively- Nina performing explicit sexuality.

Lead actress Elisabetta Cavallotti has said that the film took a huge emotional toll on her. The live sex show scene had people groping and assaulting her and the director didn’t offer support. This is a film that uses cancer to justify its depiction of sexually explicit scenes, with a pretension of thinking they’re somehow better than the porn industry that the film is about. This movie is cheap provocation, half-assed drama and evidence of an unsafe working environment and exploitation of its lead actress. I urge any filmmakers with an eye to the extreme to understand that it is not inherently impressive or edgy to film explicit sex. There’s a whole other industry doing that. Also, humans in their real life also have unsimulated sex all the time. Do something different, weirder and with more of an eye to the safety and well-being of your performers.

Overall rating: 2.0/10

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