A Dominatrix Who’s Very Much in Control

Ever the feminist explorer of sexual frontiers, Germany’s Monika Treut has found a subject ideal in Eva Norvind, who has led--and continues to lead--a most unconventional existence. The documentary “Didn’t Do It for Love” charts Norvind’s life through several identities and countries.

Born 54 years ago in Norway to a Russian prince, who long ago renounced his aristocratic identity, and a Finnish sculptress, Norvind was a blond and bosomy 20-year-old living in New York when she took off for a vacation in Mexico. There her looks and figure soon made her a movie star in the Jayne Mansfield mold and led her to becoming a high-class call girl.

While on a return trip to Mexico, the matronly, gray-haired Norvind of today looks back with disdain on a fleeting fame based on image rather than knowledge. She may have had little or no training as an actress, but Norvind clearly has a fierce intelligence and assertive personality that led her to speak out on behalf of birth control and women’s rights in Mexico. This triggered a deportation order that she evaded for years. She also had a daughter, from whom she is estranged, and became a photojournalist.

By 1980, Norvind was back in Manhattan as a film student and embarking on a career as a professional dominatrix known as Ava Taurel, who appeared on TV espousing the therapeutic benefits of sadomasochism with the slogan, “Out of the dungeon and into the classroom.” (Norvind, who has described herself as a “pansexual sadomasochist,” has said that “being a dominatrix was very important to me because it was like working out the woman warrior within myself.”)

Norvind apparently continues in the dominatrix business, but also has moved on to earn master’s degrees at NYU in human sexuality and psychology. She has treated both sex offenders and sexual abuse survivors, and performed a wide array of human services, including volunteer work with Mother Teresa’s mission in India.

The problem with “Didn’t Do It for Love” is that Norvind is simply too complex a personality with too wide-ranging a history to be contained in an 80-minute documentary. Norvind has lots to say about human sexuality and behavior from an unusual perspective, but really hasn’t a chance to put it all together in an overview for us. Nonetheless, she emerges as a strong--make that very strong--woman who is determined to keep growing and learning.

Throughout the film, there are revealing encounters between Norvind and her friends and relatives, especially her now-frail mother. Like her own daughter, who dismisses her as a whore, Norvind’s mother lives in Mexico. Her mother was a beauty, who blithely paraded her 15-year-old daughter nude before a bevy of French film producers. When Norvind angrily asks her mother today how she could have done that, she nonchalantly counters that since she was so fully developed by that age, why not? Similarly, her mother approved of her becoming a prostitute because her clients were high-class Mexican gentlemen. (Norvind observes that “from macho men I learned how to become macho myself.”)

Norvind emerges as a woman formidable in personality, intellect and experience. Yet she can be an unattractive bully in an unsettling scene with her lover, a young black man, whom she can swiftly reduce to terrified stammering, simply because he does not know or recall where she put some everyday item. We need to know more about this relationship, just as we need to know more about Eva Norvind.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: complex adult themes and a scene of sadomasochism.

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‘Didn’t Do It for Love’

A First Run Features release of a Filmgalerie 451 production. Writer-director Monika Treut. Producer Irene von Alberti. Cinematographer Ekkehardt Pollack, Christopher Landerer. Editors Eric Marciano, Jeff Lunger. Music Georg Kajanus, Tom Judson. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.

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