PVT CHAT doesn't objectify for vilify, making a rare erotic thriller

Written and Directed by Ben Hozie
Starring Julia Fox and Peter Vack
Runtime: 1 hour 26 minutes
In theaters Feb 5, available digitally on Feb 9

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

There aren't a lot of erotic thrillers or dramas anymore, but in their Joe Eszterhas/Adrian Lyne heyday, the genre was full of sexy films that were terrified of sex. Ordinary men (and maybe one woman every three years) had ordinary lives that were set on fire by an ill-advised decision to sleep with the wrong person. Michael Douglas had an affair with Sharon Stone or Glenn Close in a moment of lapsed judgment and the poetic justice rained down hard. Anybody dumb enough to get seduced was a perv who deserved to lose everything, and like a horror movie teen, an ordinary person could damn him or herself by having sex.

PVT Chat, a movie about sex that isn't in any way erotic, opens with Jack (Peter Vack), jerking off in front of his laptop, asking cam model Scarlet (Julia Fox) for verbal abuse. We aren't in a chaste world where people descend into sex hell, we're in a world where people have sex, and if they're doomed it isn't because they got hard once. Sex is the baseline, not the depth we perilously slip toward.

Jack is also a small inversion on the idea of the movie masturbator, in that he's good-looking, in shape and has friends who want to connect with him in real life. The last time I saw Peter Vack, he was cast as the protagonist's initial crush object in MFA–he isn't here the way, say, Philip Seymour Hoffman was in Happiness, to instantly identify as pitiable. The first half of writer-director Ben Hozie's new movie is about Jack trying to connect with Scarlet. Scarlet's doing her job as a sex worker as Jack breaks his end of the contract and starts to believe the person he's paying genuinely has feelings for him. They could fly to Paris together, he says, connect in real life. She dominates him, making Jack pay extra to come, and then he offers to pay even more for trace details of her personal life.

As the obsession grows, Jack barely makes ends meet playing online blackjack. It's a job that becomes a failed form of cultural currency when Jack tries to convince people to spend more time with him so he can show them pro tricks and pointers. Scarlet doesn't know any of this, though. She's been led to believe her client has investors lined up for some kind of cloud-based psychic chat app. That's the character Hozie and Vack create–smart and charismatic enough to convince somebody he's developing a microchip for your brain but too stupid to realize that if he ever managed to meet Scarlet in the meatspace, she'd realize he had been lying the entire time. Jack wins blackjack hands and then he stays at the table too long, he makes decisions with a coin flip I inferred as a hint at gambling addiction. He's unpleasant and a slave to his routines, but not hopelessly so.

I'm explaining so much about the Jack character because there's no development. I don't mean that in a bad way. Jack is just stuck in this cycle of not having enough money, of fantasizing about a real life with a person trying to do her job, and he isn't going to get out of it. As Jack digs deeper into his rut, we transition to Scarlet's life. Her partner pushes her to make all of the money in their relationship, and she gives up on painting ambitions so she can spend more time camming to raise money for his business idea. Scarlet gets three-dimensional and it's clear she's allowing herself to be used in the same way Jack allows her to use him, and that both characters are putting on performances for the benefit of the other.

There's a plot here. Jack thinks he sees Scarlet at a bodega and, realizing she may not actually live across the country, essentially tries to stalk her. Communication through the camming site continues, but in that moment the setting shrinks from the Internet to Brooklyn. That, to me, is the purpose of the plot, and whatever Safdie bros-style hijinks proceed are mainly in service of getting two incredible actors into the same room. I would have been happy to watch them in a hangout movie, exterior tension be damned. And I won't spoil it, but the last scene is maybe too elliptical for a movie with twists like this. Emotionally, it works, as a piece of plot in an otherwise grounded film, I don't know.

“Intimacy" is thrown around so often in movies about sex, but Hozie, Vack and Fox have made a truly intimate movie. During one cam session, Scarlet tells Jack he isn't allowed to come. She commands him to put his hands in front of the camera so she knows he isn't masturbating. He does, but a few seconds later we cut to his flaccid dick, cum speckling the ground. He wipes it up with a t-shirt. I realized, watching this, that I'd never seen a blown orgasm in a movie. It's small, but it's the kind of actually intimate moment so many films, even small ones specifically about sexual relationships, don't show. I've seen a thousand movie dudes who can't get it up, but I don't think I've seen one get awkwardly humiliated like this. I've seen a million movies about sex workers but I don't think I've seen more than a handful where that person hasn't been forced into it because of rough circumstances.

That makes PVT Chat real in a way erotic thrillers can't touch. For a movie to neither vilify sex or make it pornographic while being so heavily reliant on it as the crux of a relationship is incredible. I don't want it to seem like I saw a good-looking actor jack off and immediately stood up and started clapping, but it was, honestly, a good sign. I knew then that PVT Chat was going after online connection and relationships, subjects people began exploring in fake-profound movies since the days of AOL trial discs, from a new angle.