3D erotica is a knockabout farce

It is surely a sign that the post-pornographic age has arrived when posters of 3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy decorate the underground. You no longer need to venture to the Soho rental stores for your seedy fix. You no longer need to reach all-too-conspicuously for your top-shelf, plastic-wrapped shame, nor make that incriminating card purchase over the internet. Porn comes to you now, even when you’re making your sleepy way to work. It’s acceptable, passé even. So why all the fuss over Sex and Zen?

Well, first of all, as said posters make clear enough, this is the world’s first 3D erotica film. This promise of bas-relief coitus was certainly enough to score the film the highest opening-day gross in Hong Kong cinema history, with hordes flooding in from mainland China, where the film is banned. In reaction to this phenomenon, an unfortunately worded post on CNN even suggested that “a gush of big-budget pornographic films” might encourage more extensive tourist connections between the two regions. But it is not for its potentially liberalising effects on geo-politics that Sex and Zen has made a splash in the film industry. Everyone knows that sex sells, and industry types will be hoping that this oriental romp can breathe life into the gradually deflating industry that is 3D film.

If you are counting on the revolutionary potential of the 3D breast, though, you’re in for an anticlimax. The many, many private parts on show in Sex and Zen are slightly more intrusive than your standard cinematic fare, but there’s no getting away from the fact that they remain private parts on a screen, and we’ve all seen that before. No, what’s truly distinctive about Sex and Zen is its bonkers combination of soft-core porn, costume drama, knockabout farce, flying-dagger martial arts, Buddhist philosophy, and harrowing depictions of torture and rape. All of which would have made for a pretty tasteless cocktail, had it not been sweetened by moments of genuine hilarity, and a plot so ridiculous that the film will never be taken seriously enough to really offend the prudish or pretentious.

The story, based on the novel The Carnal Prayer Mat (1657), begins with Wei Yangsheng, a young Ming Dynasty scholar who marries the beautiful daughter of a Taoist priest. Disappointed by the post-marital recurrence of premature ejaculation (a subject to which, it turns out, a montage is perfectly suited), Wei Yangsheng has his eyes opened to the possibilities of sexual bliss at The Tower of Rarities, where the Prince of Ning is kept company by rare treasures and an endless supply of sexual servants. At this point, the darker and more bizarre elements of the film begin to take prominence. We are introduced to the Elder of Ultimate Bliss, a greybeard—disguised in a beautiful woman’s body—with an extendable ten foot long penis-weapon that wraps around her/his leg. We witness Wei Yangsheng undertake a genitals-swap operation with a donkey’s penis, performed by a disabled and incompetent double-act of surgeons. Oh, and we are treated to multiple scenes of mutilation, casual rape and torture-porn.

Quite a few members of the audience (including one of only two women) that I had the pleasure of sharing this bizarro-sex flick with walked out—testament to the by now rather obvious fact that this won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. Struggling beneath the sex and gore there squirms, just about, a moral to the tale: that sex is not necessary for true love. While this is a surprisingly conventional moral for an incomprehensibly mad film, it is in some ways fitting. Since almost every minute features some form of nudity, accompanied by groans of sexual pleasure (and/or pain), you are left pretty desensitised to any kind of erotic charm that the film might have promised. Those drawn to the cinema by the prospect of “extreme ecstasy” may even leave wanting a temporary break from 3D breasts.

Sex and Zen is ultimately far too weird to serve as a template for the future of 3D film. Yet watching this inexplicable spectacle in a packed cinema is an experience not to be missed. If the advertising campaign is anything to go by, it may well be almost as popular here as it was in Hong Kong. And perhaps all the fuss is down to the fact that, for all its idiosyncrasies, Sex and Zen is right at home in an age where porn, no longer shocking, is everywhere—even on the tube.