1-900

A 1994 Dutch drama about the evolving relationship between two strangers (Ariane Schluter and Ad Van Kempen) who meet on a telephone sex line and make weekly dates to masturbate while talking to each other, adapted by playwright Johan Doesburg, Marcel Otten, and the actors from Doesburg’s stage play 06 and directed by Theo van Gogh. This has some of the drawbacks of Nicholson Baker’s novel about phone sex, Vox, which also has only two characters at its disposal, but the film has the advantage of being more inventive about the ambiguities of what we know about both characters (though there are fewer ambiguities about the apartments of both callers, the only settings we see). An exercise of this kind is generally either a stunning tour de force or nothing; 1-900 is at best fair to middling. (JR)

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