The first time I heard about Greg Lundgren’s film CHAT, it was from an article in City Arts called “Sex in Seattle.” It is a one-camera, one-take, 82-minute, Warholian, experimental film about a day in the life of a webcam girl, shot from the POV of the men who enter her chat room. It’s a compelling movie, but it struck me just how sexy it wasn’t.
Rosalie Edholm stars as Rosalie, the webcam model. She works from her nondescript apartment, trying to tantalize men (presumably) into staying in her room and tipping her. When she reaches certain goals for tips, she’ll remove a piece of clothing. But to maintain their interest (and break the monotony), she also converses and will juggle apples or play the violin (neither very well) to attract tippers. At one point, she even invites her elderly and pervy (but creepy in an relatively harmless way) landlord into her apartment. Male gaze was just one of the self-erected (umm.) filters I watched the film through, but titillation is never really an objective for CHAT. If that is a viewer’s objective, they’ll be bored very quickly.
Instead, Lundgren does a very effective job of emphasizing the “work” in sex work. I don’t doubt that the daily life of a webcam model is as tedious. Working in an office seems like more fun. Yet there is some empowerment because Rosalie has a job where she can work from home and set her own hours and her own boundaries. I could see why a job like that would be appealing to someone like Rosalie, someone who is comfortable with her body and enjoys the autonomy and freedom the job allows.
It is set up to be a polarizing film, and one that a significant percentage of people will be bored by (I wasn’t, for what that’s worth). I wondered if the film could sustain itself over 80 minutes, and began wondering that after about 20. But film does have a beginning, middle, and end, and the payoff makes it worth it. It’s also uncomfortably funny at times.
CHAT has only screened once before, and no one is really sure if it’ll screen again. But to bastardize a quote from Brian Eno about the Velvet Underground, only a few hundred people may have seen CHAT, but everyone who did started a conversation about it.
{CHAT plays as part of the Local Sightings Film Festival at Northwest Film Forum on Saturday, September 27 at 7pm, tickets and more info can be found here.}