The worldwide trend of real hardcore sex popping up in films with real artistic pretensions continues with “Elke’s Visit,” an arty look at a European woman and what she calls her “relationship things.”
As a the voice of young Elke offers vague reminiscences of a past relationship, the audience is offered a jumble of images, some of which include glimpses of steamy hardcore sex with an anonymous man on a train. These may be scenes from “the relationship” to which she refers, or maybe it’s another boinking entirely. Frankly, it’s impossible to care. For all we can see, Elke is just a boring Teutonic bimbo with hairy legs and a clean-shaven vagina, and the film she’s in is too busy with flashy effects to convey any emotion other than horniness.
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On the other hand, “Elke’s Visit” was used as the opener for the most recent feature length entry in the art-core sweepstakes, Michael Winterbottom’s “9 Songs,” and the sex is actually a might hotter and more uninhibited than many of the similar hardcore scenes in that film. I wouldn’t necessarily chalk that up to any particular skill or intelligence on filmmaker Morgan Dews’s part, but it counts for something.
