Word: lipstick
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...GRANDFATHER USED to own a lucrative cosmetics business which he founded during the Depression. His lipstick line, the keystone of the operation, sold well even in the '30s. On the cover of the package was always a ripe, peachy-faced young woman, lips moist and slightly pursed, and a slogan that read: "Keep Kissable." No one then, 'least of all my grandfather, would have considered that message unduly provocative. "Keep Kissable" meant more or less what it said...
...kiss, we have advertisements for women's clothing that wink slyly, "What to wear on Sunday when you won't be home till Monday," and underwear ads that murmur, "You owe it to your audience." And we have a new movie about a top fashion model who sells lipstick so seductively that she is brutally raped by a young man who takes her lip-smacking photographs to heart...
Interesting that Lipstick, starring fashion mannequin Margaux Hemingway, has been released in the same month that Hemingway signed a million-dollar contract with Faberge to promote a new perfume called "Babe." In the movie, Hemingway plays herself--a rangy blonde beast with innocent eyes and a loose smile. In the "Babe" ads, she lies snuggled in a tuxedoed gentleman's arms as they float on a tire-raft on some cool body of water in the dusk. Both media peddle the same image--Babe, at once the child and the temptress, the pampered, beautiful, single woman who's rich enough...
Such coziness between the cosmetics and film industries is a red flag. Lipstick is simply a bad commercial movie intended to sell Margaux Hemingway. Its excuse for existing is its very serious subject matter, which is packaged and disposed of rather neatly so as not to distract from Miss Hemingway's charms...
...approach that it is totally disastrous to take toward this subject. The film manages to treat the act of rape as if it were just another kind of S-M turn-on. One wearily concludes that like the psychopath Margaux dispatches, the pack of moral morons responsible for Lipstick probably could not stop themselves...