Everything at Once

This is not a feature film, but a documentary, it's about this elderly gay couple Paco and Manolo, who for almost 20 years now are the editors of an erotic magazine called "Kink", with pictures of naked men, for which they both do all the photography themselves. We see the couple telling all about this work and their approach, and we also witness a number of their shooting-sessions with naked men.

Although Paco and Manolo seem like sympathetic men, it got a bit on my nerves how they kept on chattering, rather self-indulgently, about their professionalism and sincerity, and that their magazine is absolutely not porn and doesn't belong in a sex-shop, but in mainstream bookstores. To me the way they work, with simple looking camera's and without any reflecting screens etcetera, looks rather amateurish, as do the settings (mostly an old sofa or the balcony in their own apartment, or somewhere out in the bushes). And the way the two of them endlessly circle around the naked models with their cameras at hardly two feet distance made me feel a bit uncomfortable. The resulting photographs are mostly soft-erotic, innocuous and a bit old-fashioned, they at least do not live up to the expectation that the magazine's name "Kink" seems to hint at.

This documentary doesn't seem to serve any purpose: it feels like some sort of ego-trip for the photographers without digging very deep into their lives and motives, and although we see all these naked models it never gets titillating or sensuous; thanks to the overlong duration (100 minutes!) it eventually even became a bit of a bore!