Movie Review : ‘Machine’: A Teutonic Slant on Lesbianism

Don’t look for fair play for men in Monika Treut’s “Virgin Machine” (at the Nuart Sunday through Tuesday)--but then you shouldn’t take this lesbian comedy from West Germany too seriously in the first place. It has its funny moments, but it also meanders.

Lovely, dark-eyed Ina Blum stars as Dorothee Muller, a young Hamburg would-be journalist who decides to research the true nature of romantic love with an amusingly Teutonic zeal. Not getting anywhere, she takes off for San Francisco, ostensibly in search of her long-absent mother, but instead she discovers her own true nature in the more uninhibited portion of the city’s lesbian community. No wonder she responds to these down-to-earth, free-spirited women: back home she’s been having a half-hearted affair with a portly, middle-aged man and a more passionate one with her gay half-brother.

“Virgin Machine” is fairly slack and at times downright self-consciously amateurish; consequently, most welcome are the crisp presence of Susie Sexpert, who has a terrific--and hilarious--spiel on sex toys and on the joys of female strip shows for women only, and Shelly Mars, an outrageous male impersonator with whom Dorothee falls precipitously in love.

Why a woman as attractive as Dorothee should have submitted to either the boyfriend or her epicene half-brother is never clear; it would seem that, like her heroine, Treut herself succumbed to San Francisco’s open ways. Somehow lesbian/feminist Treut’s concern with arguing the virtues of lesbian love over heterosexual love got lost in transit. In any event, “Virgin Machine” (Times rated Mature for adult situations, some sex and nudity) ends up a good-natured, liberated sexual romp, and in this it surely succeeds.