Geekscape After Dark: Wide Open
Buxom and baby-faced, ’70s Eurosex icon Christina Lindberg has enjoyed an upsurge in North American popularity recently, prompting cult/sleaze distributor Synapse to obtain and reissue a string of Lindberg’s softcore movies previously unavailable to American audiences. The most recent of these is Wide Open, which unfortunately features Lindberg considerably less than the relentless parade of publicity photos engulfing the surface of the cover box suggests it does.
Synapse struck gold a couple years ago when they landed the North American rights for Thriller: A Cruel Picture, a scuzzy, bondage-themed slice of revenge porno from 1972 that featured Lindberg as a hapless teenager who gets kidnapped, spoonfed heroin, and pimped out to an increasingly hostile series of Johns, ultimately taking revenge on the villains who maimed and sexually exploited her with a sawed-off, double-barrel shotgun. Lindberg was already a cult icon overseas by the time the DVD hit North American shores, and because Thriller was cited so heavily as an inspiration for Tarantino’s Kill Bill, her underground popularity in the U.S. has skyrocketed since Thriller’s release.
Wide Open is the sixth movie Synapse has released that features Lindberg (if you count Sex & Fury, a Japanese film in which she appears only briefly), and it’s the third to be released under the company’s softcore label, Impulse (Thriller, Sex & Fury, and Exposed were all issued standard-label, probably because they contain slightly harder themes). Wide Open was the last erotic movie of Lindberg’s career, which is disappointing, because even though Synapse plastered pictures of her all over the fucking cover box and phrased the synopsis deceptively in order to intentionally trick you into thinking she’s a major character, she’s actually not in the movie very much at all. She pops up once in awhile, inexplicably, like a mirage, to vacuum her apartment naked or get porked in a barn amongst watchful cows, and then vanishes into the woodwork again, as quickly and mysteriously as she appeared.
The plot of this movie is so meandering and directionless that it essentially can’t be summarized. It’s about three people named Marianne, Beryl, and Paul (none of whom are played by Christina Lindberg) who get accidentally involved with heroin trafficking ad cheesecake photography and the Mob and a lot of other shit that would probably be really fucking interesting if the movie would actually focus on that instead of cataloguing every boring nuance of the characters’ lives and relationships. The essential problem with Wide Open is that it refuses to commit to being entertaining. All Gustav Wiklund does in his Special Features interview is bitch about how much he hated making sex movies, and how much he really wanted to branch out into making “serious” films. In terms of its characterization and storytelling, Wide Open feels ovewhelmingly like a bad student film, too worried about being written off as diversionary entertainment to cater to audience expectations, and reflexively preoccupied with characters ad relationships that are too underdeveloped and bland to be interesting.
Budget issues are another possible excuse for the film’s languid pace and confused, apathetic plotting (Wiklund kvetches with equal bitterness about being unable to afford Christina for more than two days of shooting due to her rising popularity with producers and pin-up photographers at that time), but a good filmmaker – or even a competent hack – can figure out a creative workaround when an effect or plot point is failing due to technical constraints.
Like shimmering oases in a vast desert of boredom and suckage, the film’s only redeeming moments are the nude scenes with Christina, which are legitimately glorious and hot. They are all too brief and far between, and made me long wistfully for the tawdry, pseudo-educative melodrama of Anita: The Shocking Account of a Young Nymphomaniac, or the bizarre, polygamous Mime fetish burlesquerie of Young Playthings. Wide Open, despite Lindberg’s tragically fleeting presence, is neither of these films. Worst case scenario, it’s unnecessarily padded. Best case scenario, it’s pretentious and self-indulgent. Either way, unless you’re a completist, it’s a waste of your fucking time.
