Mark Reviews Movies: BLOOM UP

Bloom Up, Kino Lorber

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 11, 2022

The subjects of Bloom Up are a husband and wife who own a pet shop somewhere in Italy and are also swingers. Director Mauro Russo Rouge wants us to see Hermes Osnato and Elisabetta Barbero as perfectly ordinary people who just happen to have a different way of looking at their marriage and sex, but the movie mostly wants us to think about the couple's sexual exploits. Well, that is when we aren't directly watching them have sex with other people, which is quite often and for extended periods of time in this documentary.

Just as there's one between art and pornography, there's a thin line between examination and exploitation. Rouge's intentions, which he and the subjects make clear so many times that they're impossible to miss, probably make this movie the former rather than the latter, although soundtrack during the various sex scenes—group and marathon and taking place in some unlikely places—certainly might give on the impression that this is more a pornographic work than an artistic one.

The filmmaker's approach to those scenes is a strange combination of intimate and voyeuristic—teasing and explicit. Rouge's camera lingers on the faces of his subjects, as well as their assorted partners, as if it's the connection between them and the sense of pleasure within each of them that really matter. The camera also, though, will keep its distance at times, viewing certain sex acts through, say, the windshield of a car or the front window of a restaurant. It sneaks some less emotional and more anatomical peeks, too, either to prove that the documentary's premise is real and really happening or simply to tantalize.

Such questions around how Rouge presents the sex here shouldn't matter, but they do, because the filmmaker seems to have little interest in these two beyond it. When Osnato and Barbero aren't having sex, they're reminiscing about it, planning the next threesome or orgy, or choosing what to wear to the next party. Yes, these two are pretty ordinary—in the sense that one could define their lives outside of the bedroom, the kitchen, the car, and a restaurant that probably needs a visit from the local health inspector as repetitive and dull.

An introductory scene, a brief flash forward to an after-the-fact interview with the subjects, suggests that everything doesn't quite turn out well for the couple, which doesn't come as a surprise or as a convincing piece of evidence for the movie's thesis. What is a shock in that final interview, though, is how much Bloom Up has ignored or evaded about these two, their relationship, and their history as a couple. They're people—wounded and confused to extents they don't seem to realize. That shouldn't be astonishing, but since the movie only seems to care about them having sex until that point, it kind of is.

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