– XXX is the latest weekly column in Celluloid Dimension featuring the hottest and naughtiest side of cinema. –
Directed by Abel Ferrara (under the pseudonym Jimmy Boy L.)
Written by Nicholas St. John (under the pseudonym Nicholas George)
Starring:
- Pauline LaMonde as Pauline
- Dominique Santos as Gypsy
- Joy Silver as Nacala
- David Pirell as Husband
- Shaker Lewis as Stable Boy
- Nicholas St. John as Chauffeur
- Tony Richards as Attendant
- Peggy Johnson as Younger Sister
- Abel Ferrara as Old Man
Rating: 
It starts with some steamy 69 blocking but takes a whole movie of pointless carnal romps to wrap up that lengthy act of simultaneous oral stimulation and reach a sizzling ejaculatory conclusion. And I’m not so sure it’s really worth enduring its more scandalously depraved bits, which include rape eroticization and incestuous romanticization, only to come to such a masturbatory end to a giddy porn storytelling that doesn’t seem to have anything to say in the first place other than to satisfy phallocentric sexual fantasies. But an Abel Ferrara porno is still Ferrara, and I would be blatantly lying if I asserted that this was a vacuous stimulus, because it was anything but, at least cinematically speaking.
After watching the directorial feature debut by the irreverent New York-based auteur, who also got his first acting credit as a porn performer in his first film, it doesn’t come as any surprise to me that his subsequent exploitation effort turned out to be the notorious Driller Killer. Because the sleaze of 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy somehow coexists in the same grimy physicality as Driller Killer, though instead of bloody fluids there are seminal fluids and instead of artistic frustrations you get sexual frustrations. But it is all analogously sinful self-centeredness and deleterious hedonism corroding the normative sexual framing of human relationships revealing a director desperate to fathom his darkest compulsions. For an unabashed filmmaker whose entire filmography is pretty much a major “middle finger” to the puritanism of the film industry and a dauntless assault on Western ethical notions, 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy feels like the most appropriate film to kick off the polemical mythos that gravitates around his haughty image.
I’m still trying to puzzle out what this hopelessly horny opiate trip into the sextastic escapades of a conceited bourgeois lady having flings with random characters reciprocating with her nymphomania is all about. All this artless assemblage of some fucked up and other amusing sexual scenarios is interlaced with awkward interventions by a lonely, hopelessly romantic soothsayer (Dominique Santos) who breaks the fourth wall and reads aloud the correspondences sent to her by her former lover. Pauline LaMonde plays the main character and the one who covers most of the corporeal panorama that Ferrara’s lecherous camera points at with frenetic bravado.
Perhaps the synoptic description makes it all sound like spiritual porn, but no, it’s mostly the tangible world dealing with kinky shenanigans; it’s just the mind-numbing soliloquy during fellatio and cunnilingus that hints at some religious mysticism but in reality, the only metaphysical trace in the midst of copulation is the ethereal erotic contouring that the lighting exerts on the clinging flesh. It does indeed have flashes of photographic sublimity. Best of all, it is a film with a formal identity, which renders the film easily digestible in its more scabrous portions and protracted orgasms. Naturally, the sex scene featuring Ferrara had to be the incestuous one and the only one in which two females sexually satisfy a man, who happens to be the father of these women in the screenplay. Nothing to argue with here, it’s grotesque, long and quite intense. The sequence that stands out the most in my opinion though, is that of Pauline LaMonde satiating her libido with a random gas station worker in a dingy restroom while the coolest rock music enhances the rhythm of the penetration and the lusty aggressiveness of the editing. This audiovisual timing is hilarious and naughty, tonally individualistic and quite comical given all the sordid porn antagonism that follows.
For something so fragmented and even narratively unintelligible at times, all of this is gracefully handled to my surprise. Even when the ugly, down-and-dirty rape scene hits, Ferrara unveils, via his own decadent take on urban life, a thrillingly rough but vital approach to rendering that rotten picture of American city life that would eventually become his trademark. What more could I say about a movie where its characters reach the climax but not the film (pun unavoidable), it’s neither very exciting nor boring, it’s just what it is: a Ferrara porno movie, and I can’t imagine anything more staggeringly riveting than that: A movie from the porno chic period that bears Ferrara’s (pseudonymous) name.