PROFANE

Muna (Manal Kara) is a complicated character. First we see her getting cajoled by an off-screen prompter into filming some Muslim diatribe onto video. Next, we see her baring all while hustling on the streets of America. Granted, she spits in the face of her John before sharing her wares with him … she is a hooker-turned-dominatrix …

As Muna traverses around her local city of Chicago with her fellow escort mate Mary (Molly Plunk), voices in her head start to haunt her. A taxi driver, Ali (Dejan Mircea), tells her it may be a jinn – an Islamic demon – trying to communicate with her. He suggests she meet with him directly to learn more about Islam.

The plot hardly progresses from there, but at least we get a thread of some description as Muna gets interviewed occasionally by an off-screen inquisitor. This provides some source of much-needed narrative. She’s a conflicted soul, bless her, damaged by her time in the western world – but enjoying it, perversely – and subconsciously aware of the obligations inherited by her roots.

None of which prevents her from indulging in smoking pot, and enjoying more than a small part in kinky sex of the spanking variety. God love her.

In-between, we get parties with friends and stylised sequences of soft-core erotica of the fetishist persuasion which bring little merit to the film other than in visual terms. The worst of these has a horrible pulsing techno soundtrack as accompaniment.

This film is billed as a path to enlightenment, and I can see that to an extent: PROFANE does take shape almost insidiously as it progresses (despite the fact that a lot of its conversational dialogue appears to be improvised) and Muna’s journey does become something of a dramatic arc. But it’s muddled at best, from her motives to what she actually learns from the darkness that awaits her.

Also, director Usama Alshaibi’s own motives must be quizzed. Despite the occasional air of melancholy and a definite moral message to be heard through the frequent jump-cuts to moments of religious guilt, he panders to those expecting soft fetish footage along the lines of, say, TOKYO DECADENCE. I don’t think Alshaibi knew what kind of film he wanted to make … resultantly, he ends up with a film that won’t really do anything for anyone.

Ultimately, PROFANE isn’t sexy. It doesn’t intend to be – when a prostitute offers a taxi driver a blowjob as payment for a fare, he politely declines. But it’s not very intriguing either. It should be, as we’re witnessing a novel take on sexual guilt, repression etc. Away from the Catholic extremes of gialli and the horror film in general over the last 40 years, we’re seeing something new potentially breaking through here.

It isn’t tense and, most criminally, it isn’t interesting. Instead, we get an episodic meshing of Kenneth Anger-type abstraction and video-quality aesthetics that will really struggle to find an appreciative audience, even within the self-buggering annals of the arthouse brigade.

Alshaibi’s too preoccupied with portentous editing and filming styles. The end result is a low budget art film that feels like a student project, with just the odd moment of either nice visual achievement or dramatic involvement (less on the latter point, it has to be said).

MVD Visual’s region-free DVD throws an uncut presentation of PROFANE at us, in its original aspect ratio and benefitting from enhancement for 16x9 televisions.

Colours are deep but natural, blacks are not overly solid (there is obvious noise in darker scenes) but depth is well-textured ensuring a near film-like look to this reasonable transfer. It’s worth noting, though, that the film was shot on digital.

English 2.0 audio is decent throughout. Not all of the dialogue in the film, however, is in English. Unfortunately there are no subtitles, burned in or otherwise.

Extras kick off with a 2-minute trailer that manages to be fast-paced, suggestive and also some kind of weird mix of video diary and threatening diatribe all at once. It’s stylish and impressive.

Beyond that, we get 20 minutes of "extra footage from PROFANE". It’s hardly stuff that has been censored, so it’s fair to say this equates to being deleted scenes. More spanking, kinkiness and nudity abound … along with extended conversations, some unused digital effects and scenes that were presumably edited out on the grounds of being overly pretentious (as if – ho ho). Fill your boots, if you so happen to be inclined.

I love the animated main menu page that the disc opens up with. Sorry, I know I’m a geek for admitting it, but I do. It’s very arty, and it’s rather impressive how the screen melts whenever you select an option such as "Extras" or "Trailer". There is no scene-selection menu, however.

As you get older, you realise that younger people think you’re a boring arsehole who’s never lived. They want to shock you with their ideas of individuality and perversity. What they don’t appreciate or understand is that you were young yourself at some point, and that their ‘shocking’ ways are just a rites of passage that you’ve already lived through. I get the impression Mr Alshaibi is trying to shock us to our foundations: it won’t wash, mate.

But your film is mildly impressive on levels of artistic sheen and concentrated ambience. I’ll give you that. It’s pretty original, superficially, too.

Furthermore, MVD Visual’s DVD serves the film well.

Review by Stuart Willis