The facade created by whatever red-lit studio where Scarlet performs her on-camera acts, against a backdrop of shiny dildos and kinky sex toys, is rightly smashed when “PVT Chat” pivots to her POV. But maybe that’s because she’s actually led him there. How Scarlet doesn’t sense he’s on her trail, winding behind her through dark alleys, seems implausible. Stalking the nighttime streets of lower New York in a long, black coat - Hozie, also serving as his own cinematographer, has a keen eye for romanticizing urban seaminess - Jack thinks he sees Scarlet in a bodega, and follows her. He starts taking increasingly risky bets, buoyed by the newfound joie de vivre that Scarlet has stirred in his step, even as their relationship remains a strictly online, transactional affair. Indeed, his money is hers, as Jack is squandering away all his funds, when not in chat rooms, on online blackjack. Fox is eerily good at delivering with straight-eyed deadpan such lines as “Slaves don’t get to play with my pussy, so you’ll just have to settle for the smoke,” or “Your cock is mine. (The intrigue of this is never explored.) The object of his obsession (and ultimately of the movie’s) is Scarlet (“Uncut Gems” breakout Julia Fox), a webcam dominatrix who helps Jack get off by blowing cigarette smoke at the camera, and flatly reciting debasing filth. So to disguise his colossal under-achievements and impress the women on his MacBook screen, he’s fashioned an alter ego as a software developer patenting an app that can read and digitize thoughts. ‘Poor Things’ Review: Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone’s Brazenly Weird Sex Comedy Is an Instant Classic He sleeps on a mattress on the floor, and never seems to shower, despite his hair always achieving that perfectly effortless tousle that could weaken your knees, and make you want to drain your bank account and run away together. His spartan diet, meanwhile, consists totally of ramen noodles. His professional life during waking hours is nonexistent: Despite seemingly plenty of disposable income, he can’t make rent on time, and his roommate recently died by suicide, leaving Jack with the bill. Jack’s (Peter Vack) taste is for women comfortably at a distance through a screen, as he spends his nights sending tokens to virtual cam girls who degrade him while he masturbates drearily. Writer/director Ben Hozie’s great-looking indie knows how to conjure a gritty New York atmosphere of cigarette smoke and ennui in the city, but despite highly naked (in every sense of the word) performances from Julia Fox and Peter Vack, it never quite finds profundity in the twilit gutters of a slacker’s dirty mind.Īnd that’s not passing judgment on anyone’s sexual proclivities, as this movie assures. If you like your face rubbed in the seedy underbelly of after-hours psychosexual obsession in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, then “ PVT Chat” is the movie for you.
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