The Joyless Economy

One of those films whose intensity is painful to watch, but whose images get hooked into the memory, The Joyless Economy made the audience go very quiet at its premiere in the Directors Fortnight. In 58 minutes of increasing tension, director Marjorie Conrad boldly delivers a high-emotion story on a split screen. On the left, colorful film posters race past; on the right appear high-contrast black-and-white still photographs of a young woman, who guiltily tries to hide her face from the camera. The soundtrack is a solid hour of relentless accusation by an implacable narrating voice, who uses the second person “you” to demolish the one being addressed: presumably herself.

An obsession with porn is something typically associated with maladjusted men, and it is uncomfortable to imagine a woman sinking into the swamp of smutty videos. But does she deserve all this heat, which sounds so much like self-hatred? An off-screen narrator describes the young woman’s most intimate emotions and sexual feelings in an accusatory, highly moralistic tone, addressing her only as “you” and hammering away at the sleaziness and self-degradation of her addiction to erotic images. All the while, a rapid-fire collage of film posters and video covers flicker by, illustrating her gradual descent into hell. It is quite an extensive collection (obviously acquired in the pre-Internet days) for a woman who works in a supermarket. The first batch of respectable cult classics stretches back to Jaws, suggesting an armchair cinephile; then soft-core titles bleed into hard-core trash. “Repulsion freed you,” intones the narrator in that accusing voice, which would be comic if it wasn’t so deadly serious.

The gist of this visual litany of sins is that the protagonist, contaminated by perversion, has lost her life to escapism on the living room couch. She has also seriously jeopardized a middling-not-great relationship with “Y”, a man who loves her, to spend nights with the more sexually out-there “X”. The enticing covers of Italian and Japanese XXX-rated titles parade by so fast they are almost subliminal, and a true torture to decipher for the kind of film fans who will be the main audience at festivals.

Director, producer, editing: Marjorie Conrad
Screenwriters: B. Curran, Marjorie Conrad
Narrator: E. Gautier
Cinematography: B. Curran, J. McCarthy, John Tuthill, Marjorie Conrad
Sound: Marjorie Conrad, John Tuthill
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Directors Fortnight)
In English
58 minutes