Fifty Shades Of Grey – “Mr. Grey will see you now.”

Let me start this review by asking an unusual question: how does one determine the true boundaries between an erotic romance film and an adult film? Actually, a better way to phrase it would be, how far can you take an erotic film before it becomes an adult film? For clarification, an erotic romance film is a romance film that features a fair amount of sex, but isn’t really the focus of the film. An adult film is a film that does focus on sex,and can also be described as pornography. Perhaps we can now answer my previous question; if a film’s focus isn’t on the characters but on watching them perform sexual acts, the film has jumped from erotic to adult. So now that we’ve established that, I think it’s reasonable to conclude that the controversial film in this review isn’t porn, which a lot of people have branded it. But I’m not going to lie. For certain demographics, this film, for whatever reason, has practically branded itself as an alternative to pornography. And I’m talking about readers of the book, who based on the audience I was a part of when I saw the film, is primarily middle aged women. I don’t want to get into whatever reasons this audience distribution exists for this film, but I’m sure for them it is vastly entertaining. For me, not so much. Fifty Shades of Grey –Sam Taylor-Johnson, 2015.

Now let me assure you, I went to see this film with a completely unbiased attitude, as I do with every film. I like to review films based on the entire experience I have whilst watching them, not based on what I’ve heard or been told about them beforehand. Not to mention that Fifty Shades of Grey falls in the genre of romance/drama, something I’m not averse to. With that in mind, I’ll tell you right now that Fifty Shades didn’t really win me over. The plot follows shy, college graduate Anastasia ‘Ana’Steele as she meets and begins an unorthodox relationship with wealthy business magnate Christian Grey. Although he intimidates her, Ana is immediately and greatly infatuated with Christian, and in his own bizarre way Christian becomes attracted to Ana. There’s just one problem; Christian Grey detests the idea of romance, and only pursues women he aims to have a dominant/submissive sexual relationship with. Ana however wants a normal relationship with him, and their differing desires are the source of a lot of tension and confusion between the two. And that’s it. There is next to nothing I could say to expand upon the storyline.

I think the best word I can use to describe the majority of the story is average. The core theme and concept of the film is the strong sexual fetishes of Christian Grey, which range from rough sex, to bondage, to more extreme practices that border on abuse. I get why people like the books.It’s a different kind of eroticism that the average reader is used to, and it would surely peak their interest and curiosity. With that being the main attraction for audiences, the entire story should reflect the theme. However, it didn’t. All of the sex scenes were obviously erotic and were important parts of the narrative, but I expected the rest of the film to be sexier. What I thought it would be was a sexy, passion filled drama laced with heightened sex scenes, but what it turned out to be was a fairly mundane drama that used sex scenes to raise the audience’s excitement as quickly as it diminished it, and towards the end of the film became a bit cringe worthy. It almost feels like the filmmakers decided very early on that people will pay to see sex, so the rest of the film just isn’t important. Not to mention the incredibly dissatisfying ending.

That being said, I did enjoy some aspects of the film. For example, I enjoyed some of the light humour stemming from the awkwardness of the characters situation, such as when Christian buys items including rope,duct tape, cable ties and so on from Ana at a hardware store. I also quite liked some of the cinematography; there was a particular shot which had Christian playing a piano at one side of the room against a wall to ceiling window, with Ana wrapped in bed sheets walking over to him. I thought it was a really nice shot,but I was a bit dismayed that not much else in the film seemed to match it. My final talking point is that of the actors themselves. Briefly speaking, Dakota Johnson was fine in the role of Ana, though there wasn’t a great amount of expansion she could have with the character. Christian Grey was played by Jamie Dornan, and his performance was bland. I honestly think there were better actors for the role, which is a shame really because Dornan and Johnson seemed to have a fairly lackluster on-screen dynamic.

It was a watchable film, but it lacked in the narrative and didn’t quite fulfill my expectations of an erotic romance film, Fifty Shades of Grey – 2 out of 5 stars.