Michelle William is a favourite performer. She is sweet and angelic, incapable of hurting a fly and probably the sort who keeps the light off when engaged in nuptial activities. It therefore comes as a shock to watch her as an over-libidinous terminally ill selfseeker in this much talked-about highly-overrated nerve-grating robust but redundant romp into the realm of the raunchy.
There is nothing here that makes much sense. Unless you believe life to be that way: not sure which side is up. Molly (Michelle Williams) is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Unlike Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Anand who decided to spread joy after being declared a living dead, Molly decides to go another way: self-gratification.
Enough of Ms Goody Two Shoes. It’s time let go. …Bring on the handcuffs and other sex toys.
The rest of the episodes (blessedly brief) attempt to involve in Molly’s sexual escapades. Or as her aghast husband (of 13 years, lucky number) puts it, “You want to have sex with strangers from the internet.”
Trying to cope with Molly’s double illness (the cancer and the sex romp) is her bestfriend Nikki (Jenny Slate) who seems incapable of handing Molly’s needs. Molly herself seems unsure of which way the wind blows, so why blame her friend?
To each repressed wife, her own thing. Alice (in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore) pursues her singing career. Sridevi in English Vinglish learns a new language…. Molly lives out all the sexual fantasies that her husband (Jay Duplass, in a thankless role) couldn’t fulfil.
It is interesting how female heroes in American films are coming up against their screen husbands to get lusted (not necessarily loved) outside marriage. Ref: Nicole Kidman in Babygirl and Holland. Is this the Great American Sexual Revolution that we’ve all been waiting for. Michelle Williams, in Dying For Sex, is certainly not the brightest of candidates for an orgasmic renaissance.
Most of Molly’s sexcapades are so outlandish and brutally inconclusive that they feel like auditions for the third part of Lars Von Triers’ Nymphomania duology. In Von Triers’ film the repressed women were sexually adventurous, their libidinous yearnings were shockingly graphic. Molly’s hijinks are giggly in their juvenileness. Other than a sudden full frontal flash of a male genitalia, there is no sex or nudity, or even real intimacy.
It’s like a musical without songs.
It is laughable that Molly finds men, mostly strangers, who are willing to be acquiescent to her fantasies, as she to theirs. Hence one nameless neighbour (played with overweening anxiety by Rob Delaney) plays the sex slave as Molly (so timid at the start you could knock her down with a feather) bullies him into sexual submission in his apartment. Another guy wants her to kick him hard where it hurts the most, and a third wants to play a doggie to Molly’s unleashed fantasy.
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A fourth man makes Molly do unmentionable things on him in her bathtub when her mother (the amazing Sissy Spacek) walks in…
Mother should have taken control of her daughter’s urges long back. Now it’s too late, although the series’ uninhibited writers want us to think otherwise. Dying For Sex is like chemotherapy for the libido. It may or may not cure the victim but leaves a bitter aftertaste for sure.
