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Canberra Today 19°/24° | Tuesday, March 19, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Movie review / ‘Pimped’ (MA)

THIS Australian film that has hit town with scant warning is about nasty people doing nasty things to each other. But that doesn’t make a nasty film. Indeed, it delivers a modicum of cinematic style with strong entertainment values.

Sarah (Ella Scott Lynch) is dressing for a night of pleasures, both alcoholic and sexual. Her alter ego Rachel (Ella Scott Lynch) is advising her about what she should wear. A pair of sky-blue knickers figures large in this. A matching blue bra doesn’t.

Lewis (Benedict Samuel) lodges in an upmarket house in Sydney’s east belonging to Kenny (Robin Goldsworthy). They’re both home playing at indoor putting of golf balls. Handsome Lewis is the dominant one. When it’s time for rumpy-pumpy, Sarah is a willing participant in coitus á tergo (the polite term for back-scuttling) with him in an upstairs room. That is, until she sees him standing below watching. Who’s boffing her? Scruffy Kenny. Which, not surprisingly, annoys her more than a little. Kenny’s pleasure is terminated. Kenny is terminated when Sarah buries the head of a putter in his forehead.

Much of “Pimped” observes Lewis and Sarah burying Kenny. By the time they get back to the house, the tension has racked up quite a bit. It goes higher when the doorbell rings. It’s Kenny’s parents (Lewis Fitz-Gerald and Heather Mitchell), hot, bothered and wondering why their son hasn’t picked them up at the airport after a flight from Dubai.

By morning, there are three corpses in the house.

“Pimped” is the second film (after “Greta”) opening in a fortnight that I’m prompted to associate with Grand Guignol, the small Parisian theatre in what formerly had been a chapel which from 1897 to 1962 produced plays to audiences who endured the terror of the shows because they wanted to experience strong “feelings”, where the measure of a performance’s success was the number of patrons who passed out from shock. Nobody’s likely to pass out from “Pimped” but it is indeed strong stuff stylishly (and occasionally beyond credibility) presented with an enigmatic conclusion. How long its Canberra season runs will be interesting.

At Capitol 6

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Dougal Macdonald

Dougal Macdonald

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