Filled with interviews and climaxing with an extended cin?ma v?rit? orgy sequence far more explicit and disquieting than anything in
Eyes Wide Shut, The Lifestyle is a hilarious, unsettling peek into a covert subculture. If you thought swinging went out with the freewheeling '70s, this will prove to be a real eye-opener.
Who knew, for example, that Orange County ? an area of California so conservative that its airport is named after John Wayne ? was the swinger capital of the world? Here is located the headquarters of the Lifestyles Organization, an umbrella group that loosely unites America's swingers. According to Dr. Robert McGinley, the organization's president, there are some 3 million adherents to "the lifestyle" ? enough, he memorably remarks, "to elect a president."
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Then there is the climactic orgy. One the one hand, it seems like a typical gathering of old friends ? people lounge in a pool, enjoy food and drink, talk and make jokes, even perform karaoke. But the people in the pool are naked, and in another room a septuagenarian man is having intercourse with a woman lying in a bed-swing.
The sex shown is graphic and borderline repulsive ? which is more a statement on our socialized stigma around old people getting it on than anything else. Unlike the idealized bodies ? young, taut, and perfect ? that both pornography and mainstream culture encourage us to desire, The Lifestyle shows us aged, overweight, and flawed bodies ? human bodies ? having sex. If the images disturb us, they also raise questions about exactly why we're disturbed.
The Lifestyle is director David Schisgall's first film after he completed apprenticeships under both documentary master
Errol Morris and ABC News. He has learned his lessons well, applying journalistic integrity (if there is such a thing anymore) to a Morris-like examination of human oddness. After earning the trust of his subjects (which apparently took years), he has allowed them to speak for themselves. The story they tell is shocking yet strangely satisfying. If sexual libertarianism can flourish within the centers of conservatism, then maybe there's hope for us all.
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"The Lifestyle" leaves you with strong contradictory feelings. The sex shown in the movie is so routine and passionless that the couplings look more like collaborative stretching exercises than soul-stirring erotic encounters. Might this indiscriminate, unromantic bumping and grinding be the outcome of ultimate sexual liberation? If so, who wants it?
At the same time you have to admire these swingers for standing up for pleasure in a society that, despite its obsession with sex, views sex negatively. There's something courageous and healthy in their demonstration that you don't have to be young and beautiful to find sexual pleasure and celebrate the erotic.
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A non-fiction antidote to filmdom's frequent depiction of unconventional sexual practices as an unhealthy pathology that usually leads to misery and death, The Lifestyle takes a bemused but surprisingly sober look at a cross-section of American swingers. Far from the society-flouting libertarians of popular imagination, the swingers in The Lifestyle take an almost perverse pride in being conservative conformists?outside of their love of group sex?with swingers trumpeting their aversion to drugs, unsafe practices, and male bisexuality.[...] One particularly unsettling scene depicts a folksy, flannel-clad 72-year-old widow rhapsodizing about daisy chains and foursomes before chastising "black bastards" for giving the phrase "gangbanging" such a negative connotation. Schisgall generally depicts swinging in a fairly positive light, but he doesn't refrain from examining its downside, as well, most explicitly through the experiences of a relatively young, comparatively attractive couple whose short-lived embrace of swinging shakes their relationship to its core.
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