Kissed

(Lynne Stopkewich, Canada, 1996)

Necrophilia is a tough sell at the movies. This is not so much because the topic is (to use still fashionable jargon) transgressive – transgression is often a rather ho-hum business in culture these days – but because it is so hard to depict convincingly on screen.

Can an erotomaniacal, quasi-philosophical fixation on death – on the unknown, the taboo, the dark other side – really be conveyed in shots of a young woman cavorting around a good looking, glowing corpse?

Canadian filmmakers like to corner the arthouse market in rare perversions. Lynne Stopkewich's debut feature Kissed invites comparison with David Cronenberg's masterly Crash (1996), but does not survive the comparison well.

The script, based on a story by Barbara Gowdy, attempts to take us inside the mind of Sandra (Molly Parker), a winsome, solitary type who passes from solemn childhood games with dead birds to a brilliant career in embalming.

At university, Sandra meets Matt (Peter Outerbridge) – a seeming soulmate with more than a passing interest in her sexual proclivities. However, Sandra maintains the privacy of her intimate rituals with the dead. A breathless voice-over track etched in the purplest prose ("I've seen bodies shining like stars") combines with stylised imagery of her ecstatic couplings after-hours at a funeral parlour.

Despite its fearsome censorship rating, Kissed is not an explicit film – although I guess one could truthfully say, in the lingo of home video labelling, that it deals with an adult theme. At moments, it shades into a wry comedy of modern manners – especially when Matt decides to play dead in order to win Sandra's heart. And, in its own peculiar way, it winds around to becoming a contemporary, kinky sort of tragic romance.

Stopkewich is clearly a talented filmmaker whose career will be worth watching. The chief pleasure of this film is not its subject, but the finely calibrated way that Stopkewich plays on the framing of the action – there is always something intriguing or suspenseful going on just beyond the camera's view.

However, when it offers itself as a serious, thoughtful study of an unusual and imaginative sexual practice, I find Kissed mostly superficial and occasionally inane.

© Adrian Martin October 1997