Sexy Old Cold Leopold: A Short Review of Water Drops on Burning Rocks

Watching movies about sex is a risky business. I admit that. They have a host of potential effects on the mind, and you can't really know what a film will do to you until you have watched it. By that point, you've already gone and watched it.

But there are certain directors who seem able to explore the realm of sexuality with a kind of honesty, compassion, and candor that edifies the right viewer at the right time. So if I watch movies about sex, I tend to go to directors who I trust.

While Fracois Ozon, the director of Water Drops on Burning Rocks, has had his hits and misses in dealing with sex, he wasn't the reason I wanted to see this film. It was the involvement of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who wrote the story as a play when he was only 19. Fassbinder was a prolific and brilliant filmmaker who turned in a stunning body of work before he died of an OD at 36.

This early piece, about a 50 year-old insurance salesman named Leopold, reminded me of so much truth. Like any good film about sex, it's not just about sex, but about what plays itself out around and in the sex. Leopold is a real man. He is the one who uses sex as power, who wields it mercilessly, and who leaves a wake of broken lives behind him.

He's at least three people who I have known, whose victims I have sat across from in coffee shops and on sofas and whose lives I have tried to support and help hold together where I could.

The thing that made watching Water Drops on Burning Rocks so telling, and the reason I choose to watch films about sexuality at all, is because they tell you a bit about yourself. Because I felt, as the seductions began, turned on. Just like the characters. I took the journey with them. So when the toll is paid, it's hard to blame, it's hard to remain detached from the darkness of the end when I felt the magnetism of the events that preceded it.

In this way, a good sexy movie tells a truth. Not just in an arty, detached sense, but by igniting my own desires and revealing to me the shadows that wait in their embrace.