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Reviews
24/7: The Passion of Life (2005)
Porn, documentary or feature film?
The problem of this movie is that its makers could not make up their minds, whether they would produce porn or a feature film about sex, religion and individuality. The result is a sort of a documentary about parts of the Munich sex scene and about a set of ideas that may be widespread in that part of the scene.
True enough, there is a plot about a young, attractive blonde exploring her sexual identity in the swinger and femdom-BDSM scenes. This plot also goes beyond the shallow framework common to most porn productions in that it includes the relationships between the main character and its father and the relationships between several actors in the BDSM studio. However the character and plot development and the dialogs are at best foreseeable, mostly shallow, often tedious. Many of the utterings of the "oh so intelligent doctoral student turned dominatrix" are free-standing lectures that she could have better read to the audience directly from Michel Foucault's works. Much of the acting would have been done better by the members of a theater workshop at a local high school.
Another thing you would not normally find in porn are elaborate, theater-like sessions in the BDSM-studio which contain no intercourse, but are essentially dramatizations of religious, pseudoreligious and outright blasphemic concepts about domination, submission and worship. It may be that some may consider this "art". To me it looked more like people afraid of their BDSM orientation trying to mask their sexual phantasies as artsy, anti religious, pseudo-rebellious gestures.
Also, the sex scenes are not classically pornographic in that they would contain close-ups of genitals and the like. Still, there is a quite a lot of sexual intercourse and BDSM-play in the movie, which is depicted quite freely and over long stretches of time.
All in all, the film is too would-be artsy to be good porn and too shallow and too badly produced to be a bearable feature or even artistic film. What it is, unwillingly perhaps, is a good documentary about the mindset of its producers and of some parts of the semi-commercial sex scene in Bavaria, a catholic dominated region of Germany.
Large parts of the film play in real existing Munich sex locations, the "Bizarradies" and the "La Boum" swinger club. Even the true address of the "Bizarradies" is shown in the movie. If the film had been devised and financed by the owners of these locations as a commercial, it could not have been done better.
Also, a part of the actors are into BDSM and the swinger scene in real life. So, in a way, the film offers the opportunity to see some pretty realistic femdom BDSM play and some actual scenes form a real swinger club. Unfortunately, such play is often more exciting to play than to watch and so it is here. Admittedly, the BDSM scenes are remote form many of the paraphernalia and kitsch often attributed to BDSM. In THIS sense, the movie represents a good opportunity to watch some rather realistic sadomsochistic rituals and forms of expression.
So, for its documentary qualities, this may be a film worth watching for those curious about femdom BDSM and the swinger scene in a catholic social context, as long as the watcher is aware that this is a subset of a subset of a plethora of possible sexual and BDSM lifestyles.