Kissed is a 1996 Canadian romantic/erotic drama film directed and co-written by Lynne Stopkewich, based on Barbara Gowdy's short story "We So Seldom Look on Love". It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 7, 1996.
The film stars Molly Parker as Sandra Larson, a young woman whose fixation on death leads her to study embalming at a mortuary school, where in turn she finds herself drawn toward feelings of necrophilia. Peter Outerbridge also stars as Matt, a fellow student who develops romantic feelings for Sandra, and so must learn to accept her sexual proclivities.
Plot As far back as Sandra Larson can remember, she has been fascinated by death. As a child, she dances with the corpses of animals at night, rubbing them on her body, before giving them a funeral. She performs this dance in front of her only friend, a girl named Carol, who ends their friendship soon afterward.
In college, Sandra studies biology, carefully dissecting the bodies of small animals, trying to avoid disfiguring them. She gets a job at a funeral home to be closer to dead bodies. The funeral home's janitor Jan believes, like Sandra, that dead bodies still have a soul in them. While driving the hearse with a body in a coffin in the back through a car wash, Sandra looks at the body and finds a shining light, believing that body's soul is alive somewhere.
Mr. Wallis apprentices Sandra in embalming. She starts studying mortuary science, where she meets a medical student named Matt who also must study corpses for his major. Matt and Sandra begin to date, and Matt is intrigued by Sandra's death fascination. Occasionally, they spend nights together in Matt's basement apartment, but Sandra always leaves for late night visits to the mortuary to celebrate the dead bodies of young men with dance ceremonies which escalate into necrophilia.
Matt becomes increasingly jealous of the deeper connection Sandra seems to feel with her dead bodies. He pesters her at the funeral home and begs her to role-play necrophilia with him as the dead body, but she finds his behavior off-putting. Finally he hangs himself, so that he can make the ultimate sexual connection with Sandra in death that he could not in life. In a closing narration, Sandra explains that she still "crosses over" (as she euphemistically calls her necrophilia) but now thinks of Matt whenever she does.
Cast Molly Parker as Sandra Larson Natasha Morley as young Sandra Peter Outerbridge as Matt Jay Brazeau as Mr. Wallis, Mortician Jessie Winter Mudie as Carol, young Sandra's best friend James Timmons as Jan, Mortuary Janitor Joe Maffei as Biology Teacher Robert Thurston as Detective Annabel Kershaw as Mother Larson Tim Dixon as Father Larson, owner of Larson's Flowers
Production Concept
Originally, director Lynne Stopkewich had no particular interest in death or necrophilia. However, an interview of Karen Greenlee, a young California woman caught in a necrophile act with a male cadaver in the late 1970s, got her attention. Another inspiration was reading "We So Seldom Look on Love", a 1992 short story written by Barbara Gowdy, in The Girl Wants to, a collection of female erotica edited by Lynn Crosbie, while working on another film script in February 1994. The short story, itself inspired by the Greenlee case, impacted Stopkewich because of its originality and non-judgmental tone, and it impressed her so much that it began to negatively affect her writing process.
She then contacted Gowdy, acquiring the option to the story for an undisclosed sum in May 1994. Stopkewich described her version as "an interpretation of the piece, not so much a literal translation", and stated that she did not include some details because of the film's low budget. Mainly, she omitted details about the main character's family and instead focused on her experiences as a child and young adult. Stopkewich stated "We So Seldom Look on Love" was an ideal story for a low-budget adaptation because it only featured two main characters and had few locations. The desired 1970s-like setting also helped in decreasing production costs due to thrift shops and garage sale scenarios being cheaper than a "contemporary look".
Generally, necrophiles most commonly present as single persons with an above-average IQ, a propensity for atypical belief systems, and who generally work in death-associated occupations. This is the inspiration behind the main character of the film, Sandra. Stopkewich expressed that she had never actually met a necrophile, nor did she research the topic extensively. She only visited one funeral home before the shoot, declaring it was not her aim to make Sandra "a spokesmodel for all necrophiles". Instead, she set out to create what she called an "unforgettable character," attempting to "put aside my own critical and moral judgments and allow myself to truly enter into the world of the characters".
Her goal was to explore Sandra's "interior world" by focusing on the life experiences she had in common with the character—like growing up in the suburbs, burying dead animals, keeping secret objects hidden under the bed, disco dancing, facing one's mother after the first menstruation, dealing with questions of sex and death, one's first date, and one's first sexual experience. By introducing her through flashbacks as a young girl, Stopkewich desired to create sympathy for the character in order to make her socially inappropriate, taboo passions more acceptable by the audience. Ultimately, Stopkewich described the film's focus as "really kind of a sweet emotional journey with this coming-of-age of this young woman".
Development Stopkewich started Kissed while studying film at University of British Columbia (UBC); the first draft was written by her in July 1994, and it was shown as her thesis project under the title Wide Awake: That Necrophile Movie to obtain a Master of Fine Arts degree, an honor which she acquired in 1996. As such, the film was self-funded, Stopkewich mostly used UBC's equipments and several crew members were film students. Other crew included newcomer filmmakers such as Bruce Sweeney (whose debut Live Bait was in 1995) as boom operator, Gregory Wild (Highway of Heartache, 1994) contributing to the art direction, and her companion John Pozer as Foley artist. Stopkewich gathered some money and experience with low-budget films from working as the production designer of Pozer's two first films The Grocer's Wife (1991) and The Michelle Apartments (1995). Canadian actor's trade union ACTRA provided a 50 percent deferral of scale as part of an agreement with UBC. After receiving a $3,400 grant from UBC Film Department, Stopkewich invested $36,000 of her own money for a total of $80,000–100,000 raised with the help of co-producer Dean English, Pozer, family and friends. The main production company for Kissed, Boneyard Film—a Vancouver-based enterprise incorporated with Stopkewich, Pozer, and English—went $400,000 into debt during the film's production, while Stopkewich herself had a $30,000 debt in 1996.
Because of an eight-week opportunity to use equipment at discount, Stopkewich wrote the first draft in only a week to then start its filming. After Stopkewich and Angus Frazer rewrote the screenplay in August 1994, principal photography took five weeks between September and October. To reduce costs during the filming, Stopkewich had the idea of using the company's production office as a film set; after painting and decoration, it became both the funeral home interiors and Matt's basement apartment. The initial sum of money allowed the film to be shot, but was not enough to develop the film stock, so the Kissed had to be concluded in December when the National Film Board of Canada offered its facilities to process and print the rushes. Because of that, during the first week of shooting, only select rushes were processed to ensure the filming was good. In 1995, after editing was finished on a Steenbeck machine in Pozer's mother basement, the production team applied for a Canada Council Media Arts grant, which resulted in a $47,000–47,500 sum. Sound recording was done between November 1995 and March 1996. The use of Nettwerk Records' music library and Western Post Productions' digital sound editing were done at deferred cost. Finally, Stopkewich obtained $25,000 from Telefilm Canada for completion money and $45,000–162,000 from British Columbia Film to adapt it to 35mm format at DuArt Film and Video by April 1996.
Casting and characters For the main role, Stopkewich originally desired to cast a blonde woman, since the original story described her as "a Doris Day type of character". She was having difficulty to find such an actress and was "desperately looking for someone to play that part" since the film was already in pre-production. By chance, main actress Molly Parker was a friend of the film's cinematographer Gregory Middleton and wanted to meet Stopkewich because she had never seen a woman director. After reading the script, Parker was interested in the role and performed it to Stopkewich, who was impressed and cast her. By August 1994, all other main roles—Peter Outerbridge and Jay Brazeau—were cast. For Outerbridge's part as Matt, Stopkewich appreciated Fraser's help since the story was written and directed from a woman's point of view. Matt's character became a counterbalance in a female-centric world and Fraser's constant revisions were essential to create a "full-dimensional Matt". She dubbed him the devil's advocate, "especially in regard to the male characters".
Themes and analysis Sexuality and gender Although Offscreens Donato Totaro said that a metaphorical interpretation of the film as female empowerment would be "an act of interpretative magicry", scholars usually interpreted it as possessing "emancipatory narratives and allegories of women's empowerment" or at least "feminist ambiguities" that depicts "extreme female sexual transgression". A Maclean's article described it as having "feminist intelligence". Stopkewich herself talked about not transforming the main character into an object; she instead wanted her to be the subject of the scenes she was in. She declared, "it was crucial to empower Sandra's sexuality when we finally see her engaged in necrophilia". As such, she made cinematic choices that fit it; for example, she tried to create intimacy during the sex scenes so the audience would not feel like they are stalking her. Instead, the protagonist looks directly to the camera when she has an orgasm in a confrontational way. Stopkewich chose to have a white light in this moment to make it possible for people to see how others are reacting and discourage people from walking out in the middle of the film. The director also said she was confronted by people angry "with the fact we've created this character who is totally inaccessible from a male, heterosexual standpoint", and commented Sandra's sexual acts were not phallocentric. Paakspuu, in the chapter "Lynne Stopkewich: Abject Sexualities" of Great Canadian Film Directors, described Sandra as an "id-driven, free spirit, in touch with her feelings and emotions—a loner with the sensitivity of a poet", and said that her quest for forbidden knowledge and deviant sexuality made her "a woman to fear".