La farándula

[StevePulaski]

La farándula (1998)
Directed by: Cristian Cancho

Rating: ★½

Once in a while, you find a film like Cristian Cancho's La farándula (meaning "showbusiness" in English), which works to remind of you the infinite possibilities of cinema and how little you've explored. If you're still shocked by some of the experimental and avant-garde cinema you see, to the point where you cannot think of works adequate enough to describe the experience you've just witness, chances are, you have a lot more exploring to do. When a film like La farándula comes along, it reminds you of a few things - the lack of creative limits in film, the imagination that can overtake a film's concept, and finally, that there are so many people in the world, that we'll never run out of creative ideas.

Put simply, La farándula is a Peruvian pornographic film done with Barbie dolls. At just under sixty minutes, it features orgies, homosexual sex, interracial sex, bestiality, and pedophilia, all of which captured with licensed Barbie dolls and some external accommodations, such as freakishly large penises for the characters. This is simultaneously the most graphic and tamest film I've ever seen, similar to a child reading off a list of positions for sexual intercourse but not knowing what any of them mean. If absolutely nothing else, the film creates a great phrase alongside the declaration of something being so boring it's the equivalent "watching paint dry" or "watching grass grow:" as boring as watching Barbies screw.

The film revolves around a male and female characters that stick together with the common interest of having sex and discussing it in explicit detail. Every character is just as filthy as the next and few can go more than two minutes without proclaiming how horny they are or the current state of their genitalia. After Barbie winds up rejecting Ken's advances, both of them embark on a raunchy quest for sex, with Barbie engaging in orgies with her friends, which even go as far as involving a donkey, and Ken goes on to have sex with a few of his friends, one of them a black man who refers to him as "Master Ken," setting up a slew of other problems right there. Eventually, Ken winds up having sex with Barbie's thirteen-year-old daughter, leading Barbie to take him to court where she sues Ken for statutory rape, but not before a whirlwind of other sex scenes occur between the characters.

If you ever thought what was shown on Cinemax lacked the bare-basics of erotic entertainment, you have yet to see a slew of plastic dolls trying to have sex and fellate one another. The result is a strangely amusing but ultimately juvenile parade of someone having way too much time on their hands, especially when they direct Barbies cruising in a small convertible alongside a curb on a full-sized road. In addition, when you have a smaller Barbie doll looking as if she's performing oral sex on a Ken doll, with what looks to be white cream or ointment coming out of the Ken doll's external, phallic accoutrement all over the smaller doll's face, the end result isn't arousing but downright uncomfortable.

Some of the things the characters say too are just unheard of in terms of ordinary dialog. Even if we're judging La farándula on the basis of a pornography, it's still shocking how lacking the film is in basic erotic tendencies. Characters proclaiming the vile and unheard of sex acts they will soon be engaged in and the language used makes the film almost entirely unerotic in many respects. With the erotic element of the film being virtually nonexistent and the comedic element of Barbie dolls engaging in acts that Barbie dolls wouldn't ordinarily be engaged in wearing off fairly quickly, what you're left with is a shell of a film with a solid premise but little to no competence in its execution.

In a strange way, through the racist undertones of Mandingo, the sexist ideas casually thrown around by the characters, and the downright disturbing showcases of pedophilia in such a casual manner by innocuous Barbie dolls, I definitely did get some basic amusement from the content in La farándula. It's amusement I'm not particularly comfortable with knowing that I got, but I did. However, at a certain point, I stop appreciating a wild idea and begin regarding it with subtle contempt; how quickly La farándula goes from possessing the ability to be admired to breeding contempt is pretty shocking, almost more-so than the content at hand.

Directed by: Cristian Cancho.