https://filmmakermagazine.com/archives/issues/spring1997/fuckdeath.php
"[...] the film's approach is far from pandering. To be sure, recent American films [...] have often reduced perversity to a narrative novelty. Kissed, however, is more in line with perversity's great masters: Sade, Genet, Bataille, and more recently David Lynch"
Stopkewich cited Lynch as an influence
To portray the main character, Stopkewich found it necessary to "try to put aside my own critical and moral judgments and allow myself to truly enter into the world of the characters. If this works, perhaps we can float freely between an acceptance/understanding of another's experience as well bring something back to our own."
Stopkewich continually returns to the historically problematic position of a female spectator and the equally problematic spectacle of female desire. In Kissed, "it was crucial to empower Sandra's sexuality when we finally see her engaged in necrophilia. I wanted to make her the subject of the scene and not the object,
It is here that Kissed distinguishes itself from other recent perverse fare. Rather than assume an ironic distance from its characters, the film pushes cinematic intimacy. In her camerawork, for example, Stopkewich promotes an almost uncomfortable proximity during the sex scenes: "It was important to shoot them in a way that makes you feel like you are there in the room and not looking through the safety of a keyhole. When Sandra reaches climax, she is looking right into the camera - at us and into the [projector's] light."
From the film's opening voiceover, the character's desire resonates as sublime and deeply mysterious, inviting us to eroticize death in transcendent and spirtual ways.
Interestingly this appeal to the sublime, this sense of wanting things that remain unseen
Stopkewich attributes Goudy with giving her the cinematic palette needed to bring necrophilia to life. While the film is "an interpretation of the piece, not so much a literal translation," Stopkewich herself was seduced by the story's look: "Goudy describes Sandra making love to a corpse as being like being burned by a white light." The play of light and darkness that symbolize the story's libidinal and spiritual forces also illuminates the character's sense of the world: "We used burns to white whenever Sandra touches death to play against the idea of a cold so deep it is seen as a white light. It's also an homage to Fassbinder's Effi Briest," whose blinding fades to white mark another tale of sexual repression
https://www.timeout.com/movies/kissed
Molly Parker gives a formidable and engaging performance
The tone is, surprisingly, romantic - almost ecstatic
overall director/co-writer Stopkewich's calm, non-judgmental approach pays rich dividends: the film is convincing, tender, and more than a little subversive.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/kissed-1997
is about a necrophiliac, but in its approach, it could be about spirituality or transcendence
"Kissed" was, needless to say, one of the most controversial films at the Toronto and Sundance festivals
What is amazing, at the end, is that we feel some sympathy for Sandra, some understanding.
About Gowdy's book, "It haunted me. Sandra is in charge of her sexuality. Although she is a fringe dweller, she achieves something we all search for. We're all looking for transcendence."
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/film/kissed-film-review.html
It would be easy to snicker at this Canadian film, were its subject not handled with a delicacy and lyricism
a luminous performance by Ms. Parker
ethereal soundtrack
https://www.avclub.com/kissed-1798194965
Kissed is not an exploitative film: It gives the sense that, like Parker's character, it's trying to find a new, meaningful, and comforting approach to death. Despite this attempt and a fascinating opening sequence, Kissed too often devolves into a Gothic fantasy, and it's not aided by the purple, explanatory narration
http://www.filmcritic.com.au/reviews/k/kissed.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Martin
Lynne Stopkewich's debut feature Kissed invites comparison with David Cronenberg's masterly Crash (1996), but does not survive the comparison well.
At moments, it shades into a wry comedy of modern manners – especially when Matt decides to play dead in order to win Sandra's heart.
And, in its own peculiar way, it winds around to becoming a contemporary, kinky sort of tragic romance.
The chief pleasure of this film is not its subject, but the finely calibrated way that Stopkewich plays on the framing of the action – there is always something intriguing or suspenseful going on just beyond the camera's view. However, when it offers itself as a serious, thoughtful study of an unusual and imaginative sexual practice, I find Kissed mostly superficial and occasionally inane
https://variety.com/1996/film/reviews/kissed-1200446848/
features a captivating performance by newcomer Molly Parker.
Stopkewich has managed the unlikely feat of making a film about necrophilia that is neither a black comedy nor a horror outing. Rather, she has crafted a poetic, provocative love story about sex, romance and death that is surprisingly endearing.
lack of dramatic force in the finale
The strength of “Kissed” is that Stopkewich makes Sandra’s erotic passion for cold corpses seem like something more meaningful than a simple fetish
Stopkewich and Angus Fraser’s script lightens the potentially heavy load with a sprinkle of black humor throughout
Original score by Don MacDonald is suitably haunting, with ethereal vocal tracks
https://montrealrampage.com/a-conversation-with-lynne-stopkewich/
I contacted the author, because I couldn’t get the story out of my mind basically. I’d never heard of this idea or this kind of pursuit before, and it’s just one of those things where you know you’re gonna make a movie about something memorable. For better or for worse, I couldn’t get the idea out of my head, and I thought it could be kind of compelling for other people.
Basically the film was funded with money from family and friends. I was a film student out of UBC (University of British Columbia) in Vancouver, and so basically all the film gear came from the university. The crew came from the students, and we just had to pay for film stock and some food. We put it together like that, so it was a very low-budget film
Not particularly. But you know, everyone dies so it’s a pretty universal theme. And I think around that time, I was thinking a lot about mortality, and she just seemed like kind of an unforgettable character. Something I never read before.
It's really kind of a sweet emotional journey with this coming-of-age of this young woman
I couldn't cast somebody who was right for the role, and I actually wanted to cast someone who was blonde. I wanted to cast a Doris Day type of character, because the film is based on a short story, and that’s how it described her character. Molly happened to be friends with our cinematographer, and she was just getting started in acting and just wanted to meet me because I was a woman director [...] I was in pre-production for the movie and desperately looking for someone to play that part, and she asked if she can read the script. [...] Then she came back and said, “Would you consider letting me come in and read for it?” And I was kinda surprised, and she blew me away. It was amazing.
[...] there were some things we had to cut out of the film since we didn’t have enough scenes to develop them from the short story, and there’s so much information about her family. [...] But for us, because our budget was so small, we just didn’t want to have lots and lots of actors and create all these different scenes, because it would be too expensive for us. So what I decided is just to focus on the essential points of the story [...] I just wanted people to kind of get an idea of who she was growing up, and then to spend more time with her as a young adult.
https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1997/4/14/death-and-the-maiden
Directing with exquisite precision, Stopkewich achieves a delicacy reminiscent of Gowdy’s prose. Although her camera does not shy away from the story’s eroticism—she shows the necrophile dancing naked and straddling a corpse—somehow the dramatic tension never topples into sleaze or unintentional humor
Although Kissed may sound like another Crash, a Canadian movie defying sexual taboos, it is not terribly shocking or disturbing. In fact, it is eerily tasteful.
Outerbridge does a credible job of fleshing out a character who was just a shadowy presence in the original story.
But the movie belongs to Parker, who delivers a truly mesmerizing performance. In many scenes she is acting alone, without dialogue, and the camera adores her. With a gently freckled complexion and wide eyes that magnify every flicker of thought, she has an unusual, lucid beauty
Stopkewich says she, too, was anxious about shooting the sex. “It’s very difficult when you know you’re going to have full frontal nudity,” she says, “and you’re a female director, and you’re very conscious of how women are represented in film.”
“I also tried to be confrontational with the subject without turning her into an object,” explains Stopkewich. “She’s crawling towards the camera, and at the height of her orgasm, she’s looking right into the lens—into the audience. And I burn to white so the theatre is filled with light, and you can look around and see how people are reacting.”
https://playbackonline.ca/1998/10/19/23442-19981019/
art-house indie
https://archive.is/cQeNb#selection-1099.97-1099.177
indie hit Kissed
a role that won her critical acclaim and the attention of a dozen more directors
Parker's angular, mesmerizing face wound up on the cover of Variety after Kissed
https://offscreen.com/view/necrophilic_art?/9707/offscreen_reviews/necrophilic_art.html
But the film isn’t about necrophilia at all, but just another new agey exploration of the age old spirit/body question. It fits in more snugly with “afterlife” or “out-of-body” experience films such as Ghost than Dellamorte Dellamore or the Nekromantik films
Her fascination with death, which is never developed (and given the film’s brevity, certainly could have been) is the only little bit of insight we have into her psyche
One could read the film metaphorically, with Sandra’s preference for immobile male bodies a sign of female empowerment and domination. However, she doesn’t get any pleasure from the control, but rather from the sense of emotion/life emanating from the corpse (each being different, and referred to as the “light”), making any such reading an act of interpretative magicry. Sandra isn’t into the necro-thing for the dominating/power control thing, or the sexual thrill but, as she expresses to Matt, for the wonderful “cross-over” feel she gets doing it with a recently deceased corpse. This is where Stopkewich’s cinematographer, Greg Middleton, gets to blast the set in glaring X-File-ish white light to make sure we realize that something spiritual is happening.
There are some nice touches in the film: a consistent visual look, good performances brought out through a liberal use of the close-up, and a good use of free-form circular camera movement to express Sandra’s ritualistic fervour as she dances, in underwear, around a corpse in the mortuary. In the end however, the film feels padded, even at its slim 80 or so minutes. It would have worked better as a short. To make it more effective as a feature, Stopkewich should have played up the fantasy angle, or explore in more psychological depth either the necrophilic or spiritual dimension.
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/30/movies/unsettling-visions-of-the-erotic.html
Kissed [...] takes a sympathetic, almost romantic look at necrophilia
Where Crash sustains a feverish sexual atmosphere, Kissed feels more like a dreamy fairy tale. For Sandra, necrophilia is not a form of kinky sensation-seeking but an intimate communion with souls who have passed over. In its gently subversive way, the movie hints that necrophilia might be a healthy way for people in a death-denying society to honor the dead
https://nowtoronto.com/movies/news-features/vancouver-new-wave-rolls-on
controversial
It would be so easy to tilt over into exploitation or sensationalism, but Stopkewich handles the material with sensitivity and restraint. She makes Sandra’s necrophilic experiences ecstatic and mystical
Her film neither obscures the unsavory aspects of necrophilia nor exploits them; it treats a rare obsession straightforwardly, illuminates its roots and consequences with surprising sympathy (and, at times, much needed levity). All this will be disquieting, disturbing and, to some, disgusting, but Stopkewich manages to touch on the spiritual as well as the deviant nature of the condition.
"Kissed" may be modest in its budget and geography -- there are only a few characters, and limited locations -- but the technical aspects are solid throughout and the film unfolds with palpable assurance and an eye for small, revealing details. What carries the film is its unapologetic approach, its restraint (it's impossible to imagine this film being made by a man) and the quietly luminous performance of Parker, whose Sandra evokes not disgust, but sympathy
https://ew.com/article/1997/04/25/kissed/
Kissed has a dreamy, feminine feeling to it
https://ew.com/article/1999/04/23/kissed-2/
https://playbackonline.ca/1997/11/17/19834-19971117/#ixzz7Hd5xKgJe
Fraser’s gender was also helpful, says Stopkewich, considering the story was written and directed by a woman with a woman’s perspective. ‘I wanted him to play devil’s advocate, especially in regard to the male characters.’ The director says she and Fraser worked side by side doing revisions right up to and during shooting.
https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1997/7/1/breaking-the-mould
arguably the most provocative debut in the annals of Canadian cinema
But what shocked many of those who actually saw Kissed was that it was so sensitive, so poetic and so strangely inoffensive. And although Vancouver writerdirector Stopkewich, 33, achieved notoriety by breaking a taboo, she proved her talent by doing it with taste and feminist intelligence—by lifting up a rock and finding a perfectly good metaphor
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Sweet+necrophilia+(Kissed)-a030504480 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_One_(Canadian_magazine)
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Atom+Egoyan%27s+The+sweet+hereafter%3A+death%2C+Canadian+style-a030480055
Kissed's modest triumph is the extent to which it makes clear the reasons for its protagonist's dark desires--it's the only thing in life over which our hero (so to speak) can exert complete control--a motivational issue that simply isn't one in the colder-than-death-itself experience that is Crash.
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/From+sea+to+sea-a030533712 Gorgeous camera work and art direction combine with a disarming emotional honesty to make Kissed an art house film with a heart
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Golden+anniversary%3A+a+Cannes+diary-a030214887