No Pain, No Gain

Master and Servant: Mistress Catherine with a client during a seesion at Fifth Avenue's Pandora's Box in Fetishes.

At the beginning of his documentary Fetishes, Nick Broomfield pronounces himself "intrigued, but a little uneasy." Broomfield, whose last theatrical release was Kurt and Courtney, tends to approach his subjects that way, with a characteristically English mixture of prurience and reserve. In Fetishes, Broomfield's earnest desire for understanding vies with his twitchy apprehension about the whole subject. During two months of filming at Pandora's Box, a "professional house of domination" on Fifth Avenue in New York, Broomfield films himself being offered a free session by the head mistress, who pronounces it "outrageous" that he's doing a documentary with no direct knowledge of his subject. Broomfield declines, repeatedly, shyly.

Fetishes is not the place to turn for insight into S/M; its method is essentially voyeuristic, eavesdropping on $1,000-an-hour sessions where clients pay to be suffocated, whipped, infantalized, tortured and so on. Broomfield does convince several clients to sit for interviews—you get the sense that being on camera might play into their desire for humiliation—but it proves to be an unrewarding tack. Asked in the middle of a session why they would submit to such degradation, they invariably answer "to please the mistress." Interviews with the dominatrixes prove much more fulfilling. One talks about her day job doing research for an unappreciative boss: "Having to do a job you hate," she says, "is the real torture, far worse than anything we do with clients."

Toward the end, Fetishes reveals some truly fascinating clients: a Jewish man with concentration camp fantasies; a black man who wants to be treated like a plantation slave; a cop who beats up black men during the day and fantasizes about apologizing by submitting to them. And in one amazing scene, a mistress turns a client's desire to dress like a little girl into a black-comic feminist history lesson: "Sometimes," she says, yanking his hair with a brush, "beauty can be painful." Many of Fetishes' subjects would say that the reverse is true as well.

-Sam Adams

Secret Cinema presents Fetishes, Moore College of Art and Design, 20th and Race Sts., Fri., Feb. 5 and Sat., Feb. 6 at 8 and 10 p.m., $6, 215-568-4515, ext. 1235.