CAFE FLESH
The shady heart of American cinema
By Lelo Jimmy Batista
A cult classic born on the fringes of American cinema in the first half of the 1980s, Café Flesh isn't a film, it's a monster: grotesque, sublime, and visionary. Seventy-six minutes at the crossroads of science fiction, post-apocalyptic cinema, surrealist poetry, melodrama, and pornography, owing as much to John Waters, Ken Russell, or David Lynch as to MGM musicals.
A groundbreaking film which, through its futuristic cabaret where "negatives" rendered impotent by atomic radiation come to watch "positives" with intact sexual capacities copulate on stage, announces in its strange way the nascent AIDS epidemic and fiercely exposes the mechanisms at the heart of pornographic cinema.
Above all, it's a project with an impossible history, a series of accidents, cosmic ricochets and highly hypothetical decisions, which will see its two authors, director Stephen Sayadian and screenwriter Jerry Stahl, thrown into the heart of a world where punks and peep shows, mobsters and financial directors, tailors for stars and kung-fu producers, Frank Zappa and Brian de Palma all come together.
Lelo Jimmy Batista is a journalist at Libération. Specializing in music and film, he is the author of books about Robert Mitchum and Nicolas Cage.