Xdeal

Xdeal has been my WLW movie white whale for over a year. When I started this website, I wanted to make sure I had seen one WLW film for each letter of the alphabet. This didn’t cause much of a problem except for the letter X. To my knowledge Xdeal is the only film whose (English language) title starts with an X. And though I searched often for it, I could not find Xdeal anywhere. Until now. I finally found Xdeal online. Only problem was, I couldn’t find any subtitles for it. I decided to watched the movie anyways. While subtitles would have obviously helped a lot, it turns out they weren’t super necessary. About a third of the dialogue is in English. And more importantly, this is a very stupid softcore porn-type movie where dialogue is not the focus.

Xdeal is about a terrible deal that occurs between a heterosexual couple and a lesbian. Billy and Sarah live together but no longer seem to like each other. They use sexual role play as a way to work around their dislike for each other while satisfying their sexual needs. Then, they meet their neighbour Dana. Billy is instantly attracted to Dana and flirts with her often. However, Dana is a lesbian and is more interested in Sarah. So Billy comes up with the worst plan ever. He will “loan” Sarah to Dana for a week of lesbian escapades if at the end of that week, he can have sex with Dana.

Well, Sarah and Dana have sex once and enjoy it and then again and again. The movie depicts their week together in a montage of them frolicking and having sex while Billy watches sadly from afar in various states of nudity, clearly despondent that he had sowed the seeds of his own cucking. Also, said montage is set to an instrumental version of The Beatles’ Dear Prudence which I don’t think they went through the proper legal channels to use in the film. Anyway, sometime during this week, Sarah and Dana hatch a plan to rid Billy from their lives. The time comes for Billy and Dana to have sex. But Sarah has called the cops and “falsely” reports it as rape! Billy gets arrested and the two women end up together, making out flagrantly in front of Billy and his arresting officers.

I put the word “falsely” in quotation marks when referring to the accusation because what Billy did is actually rape. Dana starts telling Billy no and to stop what he’s doing while they’re having sex. It’s clear that this is to sell the fiction that he’s assaulting her. However, Billy’s reaction to Dana saying no and stop is to keep going and say that they had a deal. So, when confronted by the word no, Billy just kept going. That’s rape. Much as obviously Dana and Sarah shouldn’t have tried to frame a dude for rape, he did prove himself absolutely willing to do a rape when met with the word no. I’m just saying, if Billy had listened to Dana saying no and had backed off and got redressed, the cops storming his apartment wouldn’t have had anything to charge him with.

Even not speaking the language, I can tell Xdeal is not a deep film with insight into the human condition. It’s just sexy people with high sex drives having a lot of sex. There’s little interest in believability or practicality, so long as things are sexy. That’s not inherently a problem, but it goes too far. There’s little interest in anything in the film that isn’t sexy. These characters are bland and shallow. Every woman in the film gets is treated like a sex object by everyone including other women and including themselves.

The sex scenes themselves are sort of meh. I’ve definitely seen worse but these ones are nothing to write home about. They use a lot of slo-mo and close-ups which doesn’t make them feel sexy so much as poorly paced and hard to focus on as it keeps switching close-up. Also, all noises and especially the moans sound like they were obviously recorded in post and that’s deeply distracting.

Obviously, this is a difficult movie to review for me as I missed lots of it due to the language barrier. But here’s some random moments and thoughts . There’s an entire subplot I missed as it wasn’t in English about Dana’s neighbour who gets involved with crime stuff and gets beaten up. No idea what that was about. Dana goes to a woman she calls mother who gives her life advice and also seven dildos. She might actually be Dana’s mother as she talks about how much of a good lay Dana’s father was but God, I hope not. One of Billy’s early interactions with Dana involves her asking him if he needs anything, he replies, “sex?” The next time you see Billy, he’s working out shirtless and calling himself an idiot. Yes Billy, you are. And so is this movie.

There’s not much else for me to say about Xdeal. Because of the language barrier, this can’t be that in depth of a review. Much as the focus here was just sexy stuff which is universal, I’ve definitely missed a good portion of the film because I don’t understand 70% of the dialogue. Still, based on what I saw and understood, I didn’t like it. Even if I found subtitles for Xdeal, I can’t imagine they’d change how I feel about the film. This is just a silly piece of softcore porn that doesn’t really respect women and has no likeable characters. The most noteworthy thing about this movie is just that its title starts with X.

Overall rating: 2.1/10

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