A PERFECT FAKE

Reviewed by Matt Brown
April 28 2005

A Perfect Fake is a gigantically unsettling motion picture, to the point of nausea for this reviewer. It's a highly cerebral film, dealing in long, somewhat-incomprehensible monologues about Pygmalion, fetishism, and the cornerstones of "male desire," which may or may not necessarily need to be linked to an actual, living human being. Perfect Fake deals in fake sexual objects, and runs a catalogue of them, from hyper-realistic CGI sex models used in various virtual reality applications, to cybernetic pleasuring devices that simulate live sex with a partner from across an electronic medium, to good old-fashioned sex dolls, which prove to be the most disturbing sector of the lot. By the end of the film, we've seen the female body literally dissected into meaningless pieces. It's been stored in suitcases, pillow cases, back seats of cars. We've seen vaginas yanked unceremoniously from groins, mouths shaped permanently into deep-throat-receptive grimaces, and heads ripped clean off by men who claim to find them "cute." If I didn't know for a personal fact that this kind of fetishism is (as with all fetishes) linked to a small but vocal subculture, I'd despair for the species. The rape and mutilation imagery isn't hard to decode in what these men are doing.

The initial tract of the film deals with CGI, and comes off a bit like a Brita commercial as a result; "experts" speak of these creations in front of overexposed white backgrounds, while skeletal digital models of breasts, buttocks, vaginas and anuses soar magestically across the screen as their programmers attempt to fill them with "life." We watch more than a few digital partners engage in rough-n'-ready sex; there is almost always a prevalent "pain" theme as the computer-generated female's face contorts grotesquely with the strain of intercourse, and the soundtrack is filled with whimpers and moans. The source of this underlying dominance scenario is never addressed directly, but the film begins to elaborately construct an ongoing thesis that dominance is the key element of the entire process of creating artificial sexual partners: the sheer fetishistic appeal of a partner who will express the male's fantasy precisely, without adding a single element of her own.

There is a brief interlude with a Japanese programmer who has built an electrode/sensor doodad to fit around his off-the-shelf falsie vagina, which (he says) has the ability to receive and transmit stimuli to a partner with a similar apparatus across the internet. Whether or not this works is never revealed, nor does the film tell us whether the programmer in question has "field tested" his work, but this is the point in the movie at which we realize that, without openly stating such an intent from the outset, the film has been almost exclusively centered around Japanese subjects. Without contextualizing the content appropriately, there's a thin veil of racism about A Perfect Fake. Whether work of this kind is being attempted anywhere outside of Japan is never referenced, nor is any analysis given to why Japanese society in particular would be at the bleeding edge of the curve on these technologies, except for a throwaway line about the country's fondness for electronic gadgets.

The film concludes with a lengthy segment about sex dolls. This sequence builds on the unsettling visual material that has come before to arrive at new heights of unrest. We've already seen females split into pixels and wire-frame models; we've seen the body broken down into nothing more than its most base erotic elements, discarding everything that doesn't specifically arouse the domionant male. Now, we watch a trio of doll fetishists go about their loserly lifestyles - one enjoys taking his full-size dolls out into the world and photographing them in various environments, another has a collection of sex dolls so vast that he keeps a second apartment for them, and a third just makes them but refuses to interact sexually with them. This is where the film goes from the unnerving to the truly grotesque - every few minutes, one of the subjects pops the head off one of the sex dolls, or reveals the gaping maw where the fake vagina will be inserted, or dresses the doll up like a beloved daughter on the way to church... or undresses her, like (in almost every case) a delinquent schoolgirl in need of some fatherly remonstration. The ongoing veils of male dominance, pedophilia, object fetishism, and sadism, cease to be subtextual and become outright text. Again, the documentary does not address or critique these tendencies, but merely allows its subjects to go about their depraved little lives. The film refuses to take a moral standpoint, which at this point is fundamentally unnecessary, but doesn't leave the audience with much more than a gaping malaise in the pit of the stomach, and a genuine desire to go home and throw out every single plastic toy in the house.