If you haven’t heard about this movie until now, you might know it as Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands, as that is another title this movie is apparently known as in the USA and… yeah, believe it or not, that title actually makes more sense, even though it might be slightly on the spoiler(y) side. I don’t usually do reviews, where I would just copy and paste the summary of the story, as anybody can google that, but with this film, I can’t help it, as I will explain soon.
A private detective is hired to find a woman who has apparently been murdered in a snuff film. It turns out the woman’s not dead, but very much alive, and he gets sucked into a torrid affair with her that leaves him questioning his sense of reality.
Summary of Dutch Wife in the Desert (Source: IMDb.com)
There are two reasons I felt like I needed to include the summary for this film. The first one is I understand this is as indie movie as it get (I mean I couldn’t even find a nice enough poster, that is why I had to use a screenshot I found), so plenty of people won’t be familiar with the story (I certainly wasn’t before watching it). The second, and more important reason is… I still don’t know what I’ve seen and I have watched the entire film!
Dutch Wife in the Desert is truly one hell of a trip, where you can understand the very basics of the story, that there is a detective, that gets hired to investigate murder, that might or might not have happened. But everything else around that is just one wild fever dream so big, even David Lynch would get lost in it. And unlike him (or his films), there didn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason for this… Or, maybe I wasn’t enjoying it as much as I would his movies…?
You might have also heard about this movie that this was “the very first NC-17 rated film to be released” (according to IMDb’s Trivia section) and I am guessing they mean in USA…? I was trying to look for a bit more information, but couldn’t find any. And yes, that means there is some nudity and some sex and even rape, so the rating is justified, even though by today’s standards, the movie seems pretty tame, or respectively, I expected slightly more…? To me, had I not known that piece of trivia, I would have guessed R rating right after finishing the movie, not NC-17.
It’s hard to write about this hallucinogenic trip kind of a movie, as plenty of things you just need to go with. It’s almost the epitome of Guerrilla filmmaking, where you either go with everything that’s happening, or not. And I have gone with plenty of stories/movies prior, I honestly love weird, low budget movies, that are easy (or difficult), straight to the point, “don’t have money for bullshit, let’s cut to the chase” kind of thing, I love those movies. But when they don’t make sense and they leave you wondering what the fuck just happened and you are not really sure what you’ve watched, but to the point you don’t even know whether you’ve followed the story correctly, something is wrong. There is one thing having a movie that’s open to interpretations, that might be on the wilder side, and then there is Dutch Wife in the Desert, where it seems like the director just wanted to shoot some beautiful naked ladies and materialise a really weird dream with no meaning he had that one time.
Overall, if you are into really low budget, indie, “makes you feel like you are tripping on acid” kind of movies, this might be right up your alley, but I am afraid it wasn’t right up mine. Some plus points for the ending, that caught me by surprise, even though I am not sure whether I understood it correctly. I mean, that is one how to describe the entire film – caught me by surprise and not sure whether I understood it correctly.
That’s all for this one! Did you see it? What did you think about it? Let me know!
Until next time,
Luke
