Insatiable The Diary of a Sex Addict   Starring: Belan Fabra, Leonardo Sharaglia, Angela Molina, Pedro Gutierrez and Geraldine Chapman Momentum Pictures RRP: £15.99 MP958D Certificate: 18 Available 29 June 2009

Valére is a successful business woman who, following the loss of her virginity at the age of fifteen, filled her emotional void with sex. Now, at the age of twenty-eight, she has many partners but still not felt loved. In an effort to understand her life she starts a journal, in which she records her erotic exploits. When love does appear it is in the guise of Jaime, but when that goes horribly wrong she becomes a prostitute. Stuck at the lowest point in her life, only the intervention of a sympathetic client holds out any hope of redemption for her...

Insatiable: The Diary of a Sex Addict (Diario de una ninfómana (2008) - 1 hr, 37 min, 22 sec) is an erotic film directed by Christian Molina. The screenplay, by Cuca Canals, was adapted from the original novel by Valérie Tasso. The film was nominated for three Gaudi awards. The film is presented in widescreen, with Spanish and French with burned in English subtitles. The disc contains no extras.

Insatiable stands somewhere between an examination of nymphomania and an erotic love story, though it does lose a few artsy points with the inclusion of Valére’s grandmother, Marie, who spends her whole time extolling her to have sex and passing off nymphomania as an invention of men to make women feel guilty. Unfortunately this sexually liberated octogenarian doesn’t make it too far into the film before she pops her clogs. The artsy pretensions do not stop there as our heroine seems also to have an insatiable desire to eat apples when she writes about her exploits, psychoanalysts would have a field day with the plot.

Okay, it’s not all silly, whereas a lot of films depict a woman’s downfall through her sexual liberation; it is love which is our heroines downfall. Having spent the majority of her adult life satisfying her body she is ill equipped to deal with matters of the heart. Her act of self destruction is in direct response to her inability to handle either the insane jealousy of her lover or his predilection for affairs.

The films sex scenes, of which there are many, are shot to be erotic rather than pornographic, and the director deftly takes us and his heroine to a different place, through the devastating horrors of working as a prostitute, where she can experience another side of sex - a side which gives her a better perspective on her own life and is the key to her ultimate liberation.

The film is generally acted well, though some of the performances are variable. It may seem like an odd comment, but this is a chick flick. Men and women generally want different things out of their erotica and the soft music and exploration of emotions is likely to be more appealing to a female audience.

5

Charles Packer