Porn Valley Dispatch: Michael Ninn’s “Catherine” Review

As I get older, the more I want the late Waylon Jennings to come back and provide an explicatory voiceover for the things that confuse me: "Why was there only one set of footprints, Waylon Jennings?", etc.

You see, if Michael Ninn's "Catherine" had had an omniscient Waylon Jennings character—or even a little Uncle Jesse—I think everything would have been all right. But it doesn't, and it's not. Mind the gap. - G. Ponante

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Watching "Catherine" is like recovering from a hangover. But some people feel they deserve hangovers.

On what appears to be the front steps of a disused public library, a dwarfess pushes a baby carriage down the stairs while a fat man in an unbuttoned tunic looks on. Audrey Hollander, dressed as a larger version of the dwarfess, later strips naked and is verbally harrassed by a man in a fancy house gown. He calls her a cunt, a pig, and a whore, and asks if she denies it. "I deny nothing," she says. For some reason, the B-roll of the same dialogue is replayed. Then she does a solo scene on the steps, then, maybe because all is forgiven, she and gown-man have sex.

I've had several months to build up an intense dislike for "Catherine" because all its hype made it look pretentious and boring. It didn't help that the two trailers released for it were similarly intensely sterile.

Michael Ninn does all he can to make Audrey Hollander, who is stunning to look at, unattractive: he dresses her like Queen Elizabeth I (the Virgin Queen) through half the movie and then he makes her speak the film's ridiculous and repetitive dialogue. As a pouty suburbanite in Roy Karch's "Desperate Wives", Hollander was allowed to be a lot more believable.

The film tracks back and forth between Hollander as Catherine in some bygone age populated with aforementioned dwarfesses, and Hollander in the present day, suffering from nightmares (as I will) of Catherine's vengeful ghost.

That Ninn's work is visually arresting, and that the tableaux he creates are undeniably artful and well-considered, does nothing to forgive such abandonment of substance. You might say, "Hey Gram, it's a porn movie—I'll just fast forward to the parts I can jerk off to!" But you'd have a hard time finding them. Ninn has a talent for filling up empty space with redundant shots, as if PurePlay (his executive producer) demanded a movie of a certain length. So one must slog through many empty calories to get to the meat of "Catherine", which is well-constructed sex scenes.

But there's a lot of people who put together well-constructed sex scenes between sexy people—is there a market for the porn version of highbrow trappings people like Ninn provide? (And yes—this, too, is a "porn version": a mainstream movie wouldn't get away with the looped transitional scenes, and a mainstream producer would have probably raised the volume on the music every time Hollander or one of her castmates spoke.)

There is no reason why Ninn, who knows how to light, could not also have remembered to tell his actors not to look at the camera during the pop shot; this is supposed to be a feature, not a gonzo production. And the "Meathole"s family of products does not have a monopoly on misogyny, as Hollander's characters are continually shouted at as cunts, pigs, sluts, and whores. Which I guess is fine if everybody seems to be having a good time. But no, "Catherine" is deadly serious.

I wanted to be pleasantly surprised by this movie, but I wasn't. It left me depressed that not only is there a huge amount of people out there who voted for Bush, but there are people who think a porn film can only be good if it drains all the fun out of watching sex on film.

· Michael Ninn
s "Catherine" (ninnworx.com)

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Previously: Catching Up with Audrey Hollander, Porn Valley Dispatch Archive