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In the 1970's the American adult film industry was riding high, there was lots of money to be made and lots of people were making 16mm films to be shown in theatres who specialised in such fare. Into this flourishing business comes seventeen year old Dirk Diggler and he is soon making films with established film maker Jack Horner and making a lot of money. How will he fare in this new environment, who will he meet and will making a lot of money make him happy?
Boogie Nights, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson who later went on to direct Magnolia and the magnificent There will be Blood, is firmly set within this fairly new industry and it's depiction of adult film production is warts and all from the start. Although not pornographic in itself, the film is able through great casting and a on point script to showcase those involved in the creation of adult content as ordinary people, for the most part, just making a living and even perhaps believing that what they were doing had at least some artistic merit.
With Andersons' trademark roaming camera often following people from place to place, his penchant for very long takes, whip pans and other unusual filmic techniques, this near three hour epic seems much shorter than it actually is. With a cast of genuinely superior actors populating our journey through late seventies Americana the subject matter of actual film production is in fact a sub plot. The real story is what the business actually did to many of the workers, not only physically but emotionally and psychologically. Marriages broken, relationships strained, the deadly effects of drugs and alcohol excess, the emergence of the Aids epidemic and the huge changes Home Video had on the industry in the early eighties. Of course all of this could so easily have been a depressing slog of colossal proportions if the script didn't inject enough humour and interesting situations to soften the edges. There is no doubt that before things got deadly in the eighties, the glory days of the seventies let a lot of people make a good living and had a lot of fun doing it.
Production values are very high, the beautiful lighting photography on fantastically realistic sets is really quite striking, as is the unusual editing with that certain stacato style later used to great effect on Magnolia. Costumes and set dressing are spot on and that whole seventies look is created with some aplomb. The foot tapping soundtrack is an added bonus if you can remember the time and, like Tarantino, each track feels like it fits perfectly into the scene it is in. Anderson and his music editor certainly have a talent in this respect.
In the final analysis Boogie Nights, although about the American adult film industry at it's height, is in fact a sprawling but at the same time intimate epic about a fairly small industry where everybody knew everybody else and that most viewers have little or no knowledge about.
If you are expecting Boogie Nights to be sexy, erotic or dripping with flesh on show because of the subject matter, you are going to be sorely disappointed. There are a couple of scenes of actual film production but it's all handled very tastefully with little nudity. The poor sets, the terrible stories and acting, low quality 16mm film stock, poor sound and filming on the fly in cold draughty rooms is skilfully injected into the awful and everyday ordinariness and acute unsexiness of filming a couple having sex on screen for a paying audience. The by the numbers routine of sex between two people reduced to a product for sale certainly removes any sense of eroticism. The sorrow and loneliness of those in the industry looking for love or perhaps more gives the final product a pervasive sadness that leaves a certain bitter aftertaste.
Andersons' rather enlightening commentary is quite refreshing. He seems like a genuine film maker with a genuine talent rather than a film school graduate who got lucky. He seems more interested in talking about the film you are watching and how it was made rather than showing off his film credentials or explaining how clever he is. Anderson comes over as a film maker who does what he wants to do rather than someone who does what someone else wants him to do. Sometimes he can't really explain why he does something and just says “it just felt right”. That is honest talent talking, you can't always explain art!
The time flies by.
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