Fifty Shades of Grey

It’s too easy to make fun of Fifty Shades Of Grey. The surprisingly modest, back-arching sex scenes look like the Milk Tray man’s private home videos. The city backdrops are atrociously fake, like leftovers from the Billie Barry production of The Apprentice. And then there’s the farcical, genitalia-obscuring framing, used to hide a little of Dakota Johnson and all of Jamie Dornan’s Johnson.
Director Sam Taylor-Johnson attempts to poke fun at EL James’ bizarre phenomenon too, initially pitching her film as a (bad) comedy of manners. Johnson’s naïve student Anastasia is a stumbling, giggling mess in the face of Jamie Dornan’s ice-cold Christian Grey, a mysterious business mogul who likes his BDSM like he likes his film adaptations: uninformed, unrealistic, obsessed with naked virgins, and disappointingly coy.
The two actors are on two completely different levels; Johnson is all clumsy innuendos, wink-wink nudge-nudge meta jokes about the film’s source novel, and a First Class Honours Degree in Prat Falls from the University of Deschanel. Meanwhile, Dornan’s attempt to take his monotone sociopath seriously is so strained he only gets a pass in Smell The Fart Acting from Tribbiani Tech.  
All the jokes in the world, however, can’t detract from the infamously irresponsible, uneducated and romanticised story of a deeply abusive relationship, and though I wanted to merely find Fifty Shades laughably stupid, I didn’t. I found it deeply upsetting. The revering of sexual and emotional abusers merely because they’re attractive. The eroticising of rape-apologist utterances like “You want to leave? But your body tells me something different.” The male audience member behind me who loudly complained that when a tearful college student finally leaves her older abuser after having violence inflicted on body and soul, “They should have shown the welts on her ass.”
Fifty Shades needs a safe word – and needs to understand what they mean.