Mark Kermode 

Seduced and Abandoned – review

A documentary about James Toback and Alec Baldwin's attempt to pitch an erotic drama at the Cannes festival, has little new to say, writes Mark Kermode
  
  


Having long been agnostic on the subject of James Toback's manly genius, I can't say that this whimsical HBO (mock?)-doc was a disappointment – merely a confirmation. Toback and Alec Baldwin team up to raise financing for a feature film that will transpose the eroticism of Last Tango in Paris to battle-scarred Iraq – or so they claim. So it's off to Cannes for a series of meetings with international money-men, interspersed with cosy conversations with their famous friends (Scorsese, Coppola, Bertolucci) and punctuated by what the makers presumably feel are funny/touching/profound personal vignettes. The revelations about Cannes (the glitz is tacky, the market is real) are all as old as the festival itself; the insights into the movie biz (art doesn't matter, stars do) are less than earth-shattering; even the overarching quasi-comic format is old hat, having been done far better by Morgan Spurlock in The Greatest Movie Ever Sold.

As for the slack-jawed reverence for Last Tango, when confronted with Marlon's most wanky utterances (farting pig's vomit indeed), all I can think of is Udo Kier in Flesh for Frankenstein satirically screaming: "To know death, Otto, you have to fuck life… in the gall bladder!"

 

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