Chantal

Rating:
Released: 2007 Retro-Seduction Cinema
Starring: Misty Mundae, Julian Wells, Andrea Davis, Darian Caine, Julie Strain
Director: Tony Marsiglia
Version: Unrated DVD

Shot in 2004, Chantal is Misty Mundae’s nostalgic swan song for Seduction Cinema. It’s nostalgic because the doe-eyes are back, the youthfulness, and the fresh-faced spunky attitude from such classics as Playmate of the Apes and Lord of the G-Strings. The innocence is back. And, as always, the innocence is in for a rough time.

Chantal is actually a remake of a 1967 Nick Philips film. The plot is pretty simple. A young, hopeful girl comes to Hollywood; Hollywood eats her alive. There’s not much more to the original movie (it’s included in this jam-packed DVD release), so writer/director Tony Marsiglia has added on a lot of detail to Chantal’s misery, as everyone she meets tries in one way or another to do her wrong.

Wearing a blue dress that makes her look like Alice in Wonderland, Chantal arrives on the scene, stopping at a payphone to call her mother. “I’m in Hollywood! I made it!” she boasts. “The lights will be shining so bright.” We see her visiting Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, fitting her hands into the handprints of the stars.

It doesn’t take long for her enthusiasm to be crushed. She tries to get a room at a nice hotel, but doesn’t have enough money to pay for it. The skeevy desk clerk offers to help her pay by handing her a condom in lieu of a room key. She is incensed. “I am Chantal, and I am one in a million,” she declares. The desk clerk scoffs. “You are Chantal,” he says, “one of a million Chantals. Welcome to LA.”

She thinks she finds a friend in Tracy (Andrea Davis), who instructs her to visit her roommate Lisa (Darian Caine) for head shots. But when she arrives, she finds that Lisa’s a photographer who’s not all that interested in head shots. She’d rather shoot other parts, if you know what I mean. Chantal finds herself in Lisa’s dingy studio amongst a number of nude models, including Julie Strain, of all people, playing Victoria, a sleazy casting agent. Julie still looks great. What has she been up to? There’s a great scene where Victoria tries to get a girl to strip for her in a casting session (played by non other than her real-life sister, Lizzie Strain). When she bails, the next girl up (Casey Jones) has no qualms about stripping down and doffs the kit immediately, and even starts masturbating for the benefit of the casting agent. That’s one way of getting attention. The example is clear for Chantal: if you wanna play, you’ve gotta pay.

From then on out it’s all downhill for poor Chantal, as she is manhandled, cheated, abused, raped, and taken advantage of by everyone in the movie. I’ll forego overanalyzing Chantal as it relates to Misty’s real life. Because, like Chantal before her, Erin Brown has come out to Hollywood to try and suckle on the “Big Nipple” (as Bernardo Bertolucci so memorably referred to it). She herself mentions in the commentary that the role really resonated with her. “This particular script was very autobiographical for me,” she says. “I related to this character on many different levels, just being young and naïve and trying to enter into an industry that is completely ruthless and very demanding.” As director Marsiglia says in the commentary, almost everything that occurs in the film, every depravity, is something that he’s seen happen in Hollywood, or comes from someone who knows someone who it happened to.

I’m a huge fan of Marsiglia. He shot this on grainy film stock, instead of shiny digital tape, which makes all the sense in the world given the grimy subject matter. He’s also a master of ambient sound. There are some great touches, such as the grating sound of the elevator, or the way that sirens and helicopters always intrude on the dialogue when the characters are outside, or even when Chantal is indoors – when she’s trying to escape the outside world, the outside world keeps intruding on her.

Marsiglia’s made the most interesting films of Misty Mundae’s career. And to think that he does what he does with a limited budget, and only a few days of shooting, his work seems even more amazing to me. I think he usually short-changes sensuality for violence and gore, and he’ll probably even admit that himself (in the commentary track, he says that he doesn’t think of his work with Misty Mundae as being softcore, and seems genuinely surprised when he hears her refer to herself as a “former softcore actress”), but even in the midst of dank and depressing fare such as this, or Lust for Dracula, he’ll throw in an incredibly touching scene of eroticism that stands out in contrast to the squalor around it.

In Lust for Dracula, it was a poolside scene between Misty and Darian Caine; in Chantal there’s a scene between Misty and Julian Wells where they are turning a trick, performing a girl-girl show for an old guy, yet Chantal appears to be truly turned on by having this woman go down on her, and she has an orgasm in spite of herself. Much of the scene is just Misty’s face alone, registering pleasure, or Misty and Julian kissing post-coitally. It’s a moment of pure optimism that shines out at a moment when Chantal should be at her lowest ebb. A scene like that is not just thrown in there for the heck of it; it’s crucial to the plot that Chantal finally thinks someone loves her. When that inevitably doesn’t work out, and her savior fails her, it’s the final dagger in the heart for her Hollywood dreams, and the movie careens to it’s depressing conclusion.

Maybe I’m short-changing the sex scenes in my review of the movie. I mean, after all, this site is about softcore, right? Well, there’s plenty of nudity, don’t get me wrong. But I’m treating this like a mainstream movie, because despite its low budget, I think it aims higher than the usual fare that we review here. The trailer alone looks like a million bucks. It’s more like a real movie with some softcore thrown in. It’s not as explicit as most of Marsiglia’s other ventures with Seduction, which leads me to wonder whether there will be a further director’s cut released in the future. There’s already an R-rated version (which means Return to Shelf, right Pumpdoc?) and an unrated version; we reviewed the latter.

In the meantime, revel in everything this DVD includes. There’s no less than two commentary tracks, one with Marsiglia and Misty herself, and another with Marsiglia and producer Michael Raso. The one with Misty is painfully honest, as she talks about how hard the shoot was, and how less than enthusiastic she was about her career at the time of the shoot. They shot this one back to back with Lust for Dracula, in less than two weeks, and the schedule took a toll on her. She calls the shoot “painful” and she ended up covered in bruises. “Poor Chantal,” she muses. “She’s beat to shit in every scene.” Not only that, but Misty ended up having something of an emotional breakdown on the next to last day of shooting.

The original Chantal has a commentary track as well, featuring Nick Philips in conversation with 42nd Street Pete, neither of whom bothered to prepare. There’s a wonderful moment therefore, where both of them are making great pains to inform us how little you could show back then, when a rather explicit shot shows up right at that moment, leaving them hemming and hawing.