Though the audience, having heard about the book, presumably knows all about Christian’s sexual proclivities, virginal Anastasia hasn’t a clue, even when he all but gives it away with lines like, “I enjoy very physical pursuits” and “I exercise control in all things, Miss Steele.”Įventually, as these two can’t leave each other alone, Christian tells Anastasia about his “playroom,” an immaculate space filled with restraints, whips and assorted bondage paraphernalia so tastefully arranged you expect to see it in a future issue of Architectural Digest.Īnastasia, being a sensible young person, is less than impressed with what she calls “the red room of pain.” But Christian, with a dark secret in his past, is nothing if not determined to make her part of his world, and as they go back and forth about the submissive contract he wants her to sign, discussions of sexual situations that can’t be mentioned in a family newspaper tease us with a frisson of danger. The pornography of possessions is definitely alive and well in this production.Īgainst all odds, sparks fly between Anastasia and Christian during the interview to such an extent that the busiest man in the world tells his secretary to cancel his next meeting. She’s a mouseburger of a college senior while at 27, a major whiz at telecommunications, he’s “the world’s most eligible billionaire bachelor.” We’ve seen just what that means in the film’s opening sequence, which lingers as lovingly over Christian’s extensive wardrobe - those suits, those shirts, those grey ties! - as it will later over his drop-dead apartment and snazzy private helicopter. (Naturally she snags a parking space right in front of the building it’s that kind of a movie.) Even the Cohens and the Kellys didn’t have it this hard.Īnastasia and Christian meet cute when she fills in for a sick journalist friend and agrees to drive to Seattle to interview him for the newspaper at Washington State University, where he will give the commencement speech. So while Anastasia Steele (Johnson) yearns for the dreamy coupling of romantic equals, Christian Grey (Dornan), contemptuously proclaiming, “I don’t do the girlfriend thing,” insists on the dominant/submissive model of the BDSM world.
#FIFTY SHADES OF GREY MOVIE BUY SERIAL#
Banks”), “Fifty Shades” fits snugly into a very specific Hollywood mold, the romance between the millionaire and the shop girl, with roots that go at least as far back as Mary Pickford’s last silent film, 1927’s “My Best Girl” and the 1930s radio serial “Our Gal Sunday.”īut as director Sam Taylor-Johnson (who dealt with the early years of John Lennon in “Nowhere Boy”) understands, given that traditional barriers to romance like differences in status, in race, in religion, have been all but obliterated, “Fifty Shades,” both book and novel, has to posit a new kind of difficulty that can keep loving couples apart.
In fact, the celebrated kinky elements in “Fifty Shades” are so used as a tease in this considerably less explicit film (rated no more than R for, among other things, “some unusual behavior”) that when the worst does take place - it’s a painful and distinctly unpleasant whipping, if you must know - it feels so out of place it seems to have come from a different film altogether.Īs adapted from the novel by Kelly Marcel (“Saving Mr.
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