Venice. Help Me Eros.

"Help Me Eros opens on the televised image of a carp being prepared alive - scaled, cut, sauced and eaten while its mouth opens and closes frantically," writes Ronnie Scheib in Variety. "As a metaphor for the mental state of its hero (played by helmer/scripter Lee Kang-sheng in the passive, deadpan wanderer role he practically patented for Tsai Ming-liang), pic hits an immediate high it strains in vain to duplicate or maintain."

"[T]he urgency and implied poignancy [Tsai's] films usually generate is absent here," writes Dan Fainaru in Screen Daily. "Lee's picture instead relies on the appeal of some pretty kinky sexual acrobatics, performed at length and with very little restraint on camera, to keep the faith of his admirers intact."

Updated through 9/6.

Update, 9/6: "Aside from some unnecessarily gymnastic sex scenes, there's very little action in the picture. It follows a gloomy young man named Ah Jie (Kang-Sheng) as he transfers his fantasies about the woman behind the voice on a help line to a girl who works selling betel nuts and cigarettes from a glass and neon sidewalk booth," writes Ray Bennett in the Hollywood Reporter. "He really likes to smoke, and enjoys exhaling onto women's hair and into their mouths. Smoke, however, drifts away leaving a bit of a stink, much like this movie."

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Covering the coverage: Venice 07. Index.

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Posted by dwhudson at September 5, 2007 12:40 PM