Another day, another feature from Doris Wishmans 'Moonlight Years' collection, and a film that has a pretty okay premise that gets stretched WELL beyond its elasticity.

'Indecent Desires' plot is interesting, but astonishingly brief. A chap call 'Zeb' finds a doll in a trash can while walking in the park, and decides to take it home. On the way home he meets Ann, a woman who…in Zebs opinion shares a striking resemblance to the doll.

On getting the doll home, Zeb begins to caress it, and it turns out that Ann and the doll have some kind of possessive link, as Zebs caresses begin to transfer onto Ann. Ann is of course deeply confused and distraught about this, and has NO idea why she feels the way shes feeling. After closing herself off to people when this eventually ends up happening a few times, Zeb by chance realises that the doll seems to be having some sort of effect on Ann, and decides to act out all kinds of heinous stuff on the doll to…Im guessing drive Ann insane, so that she cuts off all her friends and might actually 'get' with Zeb? Its kind of hard to really say what the point of this film was honestly…

What we have here is a plotline that realistically should have been a 20-30 minute short film, extended out to 71 minutes with repetition that tests the patience and strength of even the most ardent cinephile. And erotic sequences that are 'soft' and drag for signficantly longer than they should do too.

Theres almost no dialogue for the full runtime barring very brief conversational exchanges, most of what happens on screen is visual only. The characters arnt well defined, dont really go through much development and we dont really learn much about them as the film goes on. Instead we get a fleeting snapshot into 'just some folk' for an hour, before being dumped back out in reality.

And the combination of all of these elements results in a film that feels abhorrently over long, border painful to actually sit through, with very little going on and every possible opportunity to drag ass is thoroughly exhausted.

Had this been a 20-30 minute short; this could have been a really interesting weird little movie that I probably would have given a signficantly higher score to. Indeed, the direction and cine are a little spotty, but at least Wishman vaguely knew how to shoot in black and white, how to light for it, compositions that work within the sequence and how to make people look good in greyscale…

Instead its a film that flounders between being a surreal pseudo comedy, a sexploitation flick and briefly dips into being a 'Roughie' in the 3rd act. It doesnt really know what it wants to be, what it wants to say or how it wants to say it, and it drags itself out to painful lengths to no real 'enlightenment' on that front.

While visually its a relatively solid picture, with okay editing and a good jazzy soundtrack to help keep at least SOME sense of energy up. The characters dont really get much time to really bring their bast act to the camera, and the whole thing ends up feeling very thin on the ground and without much substance.

If it were truncated, I wouldnt hesitate to recommend it. As it stands? its a good idea, mishandled into a painful watch, I likely wont revisit it again, I cant recommend it. and I can confidently say, there's better Wishman out there than this.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/indecent-desires/