Alt.sex.documentarie: Cristine Richey's Tops & bottoms

TAKE ONE, Dec-Feb, 1999 by Cynthia Amsden

In 1994, the Canadian film industry acquired international notoriety with the film Exotica. By 1996, the reputation peaked with Kissed and Crash, but it has flagged slightly since then and is on the verge of being classified as missing in action. While The Five Senses is worthy of international acclaim, it's far from scandalous. But Canada may be back on the map again, thanks to Cristine Richey, director of Tops & Bottoms.

In any other country, Richey would just be a documentary filmmaker, but here, she's made herself a point of controversy by selecting for her latest subject of inspection, sadomasochism. Upon its theatrical release in October 1999, but before the televised premiere on TVO's The View From Here (February 16, 2000), Tops & Bottoms became the whipping boy of critics. But you have to look at it this way. It's been four years since Crash, so eventually someone is going to do something outrageous. Tops & Bottoms, the socio-politico-economic-religious (and, oh yes, sexual) romp is the second documentary effort from Richey, whose first work, In the Gutter and Other Good Places [also on The View From Here in February], focused on the homeless in Calgary. In the Gutter premiered at the 1993 Toronto International Film Festival, and earned an armful of awards including the 1994 Genie for Best Feature Documentary. What it also gave Richey was the credibility to finance her investigation into the realm of what she regards as "the human condition."

There are conditions and then there are "conditions." The ones this former TV news reporter enjoys are from the darker side of the human-foible buffet and a little bit of controversy helps. Add a touch of the fringe, the disenfranchised, and you'll be hard pressed to find an underdog she doesn't want to feed or at least scratch around the ears. Richey tried the news story route. At 4:30 p.m. one afternoon in the early 1990s, while working for CBC, she began an interview with a woman dying of bowel cancer during a doctors' strike. Two thoughts were playing simultaneously: "I'm never going to see this woman alive again and I hope she gets really emotional in front of the camera. It was disgusting."

The cognitive dissonance of the experience was stultifying. Richey finished the story, quit her job and turned to documentary filmmaking. It was her solution to the superficiality of news coverage. In the Gutter took four years to make while Tops & Bottoms took five. "Investigating a subculture empowers me because I am seeing things that most people wouldn't want to see." She is also seeing things that require time to be seen properly. Tops & Bottoms approaches S&M ideologically, first from a historical perspective, working its way up from the flagellating monks in the Middle Ages, through the 1700s and the Marquis de Sade, the 1800s and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Dr. Krafft-Ebing and the Victorian concept of corporeal punishment in schools, along to Hitler and Eva Braun and ending with an analysis of the feast of capitalism. The narrative is complemented by the theories of Erich Fromm, University of Toronto's philosophy professor and media guru Mark Kingwell, Brother Leo Callahan from St. Michael's Academy in New York and Dr. Paul Fedoroff of the Clarke Site of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. To avoid being completely theoretical, Richey follows the relationship of one specific master/slave relationship, Robert and Mary Dante, and their slave-in-training, Mercedes, which vacillates between menage a trois to fromage a trois, depending on one's viewpoint.

It's a very bright October morning on Queen Street West in Toronto, positively the wrong time of day to conduct an interview with the documentarian on this subject. But the truth of the matter is that by interspersing bits of pierced genitalia, the message can be obscured (blotted out occasionally) and it is best to see if the material can stand up under the full logic of day. Finding her way into this world "was one of those serendipitous moments," Richey recalls about her original inspiration for Tops & Bottoms. "I was editing In the Gutter in Toronto and I was looking at this loft space at the same time as another gentleman. The landlord was showing us the `show suite' and opens the door to a loft that contained just a bed, the largest vat of Vaseline I'd ever seen in my life and two very large women with three telephones. It was a phone sex business." The memory of the image still makes her laugh. "Anyway, I ended up going for coffee with this man, and he spent hours telling me about his sex life and brought me into this world. It was another year before I finished In the Gutter, but I realized, this was my next project. I did see him two years later at a party. He was dressed as a little girl."

Rudy Buttignol, creative head of documentaries at TVO and commissioning editor of Tops & Bottoms, threw down the gauntlet to Richey. "People avoid pain at all costs," he surmised. "Pharmaceutical companies are making a fortune because of it. So why are these people paying for pain?" Richey took up the challenge and waded in. At first, she admits to touristing the scene. Armed, initially, with a video-cam, she began to reconnoitre around fetish parties, but the camera was quickly taken away. It offended the dominants who liked their illusion of control. She became a spy in the house of perverse love. "I'd wear a data recorder with a microphone in my rubber suit with a little hole cut out. It became a game to get great conversations. I have thousands of tapes of voice-overs that I'll never use."