Normal Love (1963) User Reviews

bloody fishes, scary eyes and horny spiders

[mrdonleone · 6/10 · 18 April 2009]

it was really strange, this one from Jack Smith. we see rubber spiders and bloody fishes. we see written title openings, like in many other Smith films. we hear the wrong music at the wrong times. we see an Indian guy (could he be the main character?) walking around the woods like an animal in human forms. we see a lot of trees (is this a small forest or a giant garden?) with on the background score an irritating sound that doesn't seem to end at all. we see costumed people in mud (yes, costumed like in Chumlum but without the exotic dancers). we see people sleeping.

so we see a lot. but what is the meaning of the title? what's the meaning of this 'Normal Love'? maybe it's just the opposite: there's a party going on after the couple that had sex (I presume) are sleeping. maybe Smith wanted to show us normal sex and the party is the highlight of their consummation. possibly, but it remains a stupid movie. a waste of time (almost an hour less to live).

A masterpiece

[amjad_qureshi · 10/10 · 29 November 2005]

Mostly filmed the year Smith's orgy-comedy Flaming Creatures became a famous obscenity case, Normal Love is a kind of lyrical sequel, replacing the earlier film's bleached-out black and white with lush color and its urban claustrophobia with rural locales outside New York City. The cast of "creatures," including Mario Montez and Tiny Tim, perform in a series of disjointed sequences that oscillate between trancelike impersonation and utterly reflexive self-parody: a mermaid in a tub, for example, is larger than life yet totally ridiculous, her tail phonier than the worst B-movie costume. Smith's gender visions, more radical than mainstream concepts of drag, conflate dress-up with striptease, ludicrous acting with a sure belief that one can become one's costume. His visual style is a dense and demented re-creation of von Sternberg, the smallest fashion accessory a radiant surface as camera and character--and character and costume--move in a coordinated ballet at once graceful and spastic. It is the movie to cherish for the generations to come.