Blue Rita

Critical Perspective

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  This is one of Franco’s more audience-friendly sex dramas, and if your personal taste in interior design runs to 1970s ‘kitsch-moderne’ then it’s a veritable smorgasbord of visual pleasure. … Blue Rita tickles the senses so efficiently that it’s half an hour before one realises that the story has gone precisely nowhere. … Yet for all the fun, we stay resolutely ‘outside the frame’; nothing quite draws us into the charmed space where Franco’s best films spin their mesmeric voodoo. Despite its visual allure Blue Rita is second-string Franco; mainly, I think, because it’s devoid of his penchant for improvisation. … With its green ‘aphrodisiac potion’ poured over naked men, its spiteful lesbian dominatrices, the gold-spiked cages with descending ceilings, swirling narcotic vapours, coloured lights atop sci-fi gadgetry and nude women in gas masks, the whole affair is an amusing romp through fetish-comic imagery. If it stays just a step away from true delirium it remains a trip well worth taking.