...with sort of energetic visual stylisation typical of recent Latin American cinema. In this case, the hyperactive editing and camera movement are doubled in a relentlessly deployed split screen that offers events from different perspectives in parallel or concurrent footage to complement or counterpoint each other. After a successful run through the festival circuit, the film has largely vanished from sight, although it has been released on DVD. The combination of scattered praise and fleeting distribution followed by definitive neglect--a not uncommon fate for first features--may reflect that the film's content and technique are masterfully developed but superficially familiar, with its raw earnestness sometimes compromised by didactic demonstrations of the obvious. This response overlooks a serendipitous effect of the film's intricate structure, which uses multiple overlapping narratives whose central character also appears in other stories. Straddling Bolivia and the United States, they implicitly relate Western and non-Western experience in an unusually provocative, systematic and non-deterministic way. As much for its faults as for its elegances, which are apparent in equal measure, Sexual Dependency is an instructive case study of the obstacles to achieving artistic representation of globalised society.

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Rather than a single picture of contemporary existence from a consistent point of view, Sexual Dependency offers us an array of perspectives which reveal a global process of standardisation at work undermining all pre-existing cultures, Western as much as non-Western. There are two basic dimensions to this process, sexual and economic, which are apparent in all the film's stories. The first three, which are set in Bolivia, explore the commodification of sexual and personal identity driven by conformity to an omnipresent image of the desirable body which is propagated by the mass media and unrelated to the realities of lived experience. They feature a girl from the slums coming of age unwanted while her more desirable friend is virtually date raped, a boy harried by his friends into losing his virginity to a prostitute and, finally, a rich, temperamental caricature macho Latin male preparing to leave to study in the U.S.

A curious feature of these narratives is that they have contemporary Western themes with only a seemingly coincidental setting in Bolivia, a country deeply polarised by intense class and ethnic rivalries between a wealthy, white and increasingly separatist oligarchy dominating the lowlands (including Santa Cruz, where Sexual Dependency is set) and anti-capitalist indigenous communities. It is only once the film moves away from Bolivia, on to its two final stories set in the U.S., that the multiple narrative structure allows us to locate what we have seen in Bolivia as part of a larger whole, though without crudely relating America and Bolivia as cause and effect. This is particularly so given the American stories--depicting the travails of a closeted gay advertising model and a black woman rehearsing a theatre piece--have nothing in common with Bolivia, with the only explicit link--that the macho student from Bolivia is raped by the model's fellow football players--appearing a gratuitous climax to the film. Outside the explicit narrative content, the economic dimension of globalisation gains representation as the film's structure works to retroactively rewrite our understanding of the Bolivian stories in light of the American ones while presenting the West as only one element of the system it propagates, and as much a victim of it as are the countries it dominates.

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In this, Sexual Dependency fails to conform to the usual pattern for representing the division between the West and the Rest, in which films are either set exclusively in the West and deal with it in isolation, or set outside it and present life in a Third World country while the West appears, if at all, as the source of conditions the film depicts. Such a division of labour might be considered a falsifying reification of interdependencies, differences and imposed uniformities which ignore national bounds. In contrast, Sexual Dependency attempts to depict the systemic nature of these commonalities. This need not be considered intentional, although it may reflect that the film is a rare Bolivian--U.S. coproduction with autobiographical roots in the experience of Bellot and cowriter Lenelle Moise, which similarly straddles the First and Third Worlds. More fundamentally, it is an effect of the film's structure of multiple narratives set in a Western and non-Western country. This does not imply the film must have the structure it does because of its subject or the world it depicts. Rather, following Frederic Jameson, the film, like any form, can be read as an "unstable and provisory solution to an aesthetic dilemma which is itself the manifestation of a social and historical contradiction." (1) To understand the aesthetic dilemma which drives Sexual Dependency, we might start with the contradiction.

A first thesis: contemporary American society cannot be fully understood without reference to the Third World realities which both sustain and destabilise it, while, conversely, those realities cannot be specified without relation to the Western society which overshadows them. Unless this interdependence is recognised, we see two seemingly disconnected worlds whose form appears at once inevitable and inexplicable. There is "the view from the top," which "reduces its subjects to the illusions of...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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