Chastity (1969) – DVD

½*/**** Image B Sound B
starring Cher, Barbara London, Stephen Whittaker, Tom Nolan
screenplay by Sonny Bono
directed by Alessio de Paola

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There is nothing more dangerous than a cuddly celebrity with avant-garde pretensions. The idea of a cheesy popular entertainer pouring his heart into something "serious" and "artistic" is wrong on so many levels: not only does it usually show him up as ignorant of the good work in the field he wants to hijack, but it also denigrates the deflationary appeal of what he actually does well. Normally the result just falls flat on its face, but with a little flamboyance–as in the case of William Shatner's "Transformed Man" album–the effort can result in a camp howler of uncommon magnitude. That would likewise be the fate of Chastity, a Sonny Bono-penned opus meant to endow his then-paramour Cher with the gravitas she clearly lacked on their variety show. With every (drunken, staggering) motion it takes towards significance, Chastity gets further and further away from it. We're talking planets.

A braless, bouncing Cher plays the eponymous heroine, a drifter with a difference: she picks up men with the intention of not sleeping with them, since she feels she can't trust a man any farther than she can make him drool (which, given the male cast's fascination with her, isn't very far). A troubled sort, Chastity doesn't "know what she wants," and a philosophical bent leads her to speak–sometimes in voiceover, sometimes to herself–on subjects ranging from the unworthiness of men to "do flowers cry when you pick them?" Eventually, Chastity crosses paths with two disparate individuals: sweet young man Eddie (Stephen Whittaker), who shows her the love and respect she's been missing, and icy lesbian Diana Midnight (Barbara London), who manipulates our heroine when Chastity visits a Mexican bordello.

This is a Svengali exercise of a special sort. Producer-writer Bono is sexually obsessed with his wife, leering at her in tight outfits and emphasizing her voyeuristic appeal to the men in the cast–and yet he doesn't want anyone else to touch her, forcing him to contrive rebuffs for every advance that she receives. He's at cross-purposes with himself, condescendingly wanting to grant her "freedom" and a "healthy" relationship while secretly yearning to penetrate her defenses and bag her as a trophy, marking the film as an uneasy combination of pop psychology and jiggle-happy exploitation. This becomes all the more unpleasant in the contrasting of sensitive young soul/author surrogate Eddie with dyke-in-a-lime-green-pantsuit Diana: because Bono is looking for a subterfuge to justify his male-supremacist tract, he coats one in false vulnerability and the other in a ridiculous cold-hearted stereotype.

Leaving aside this unpleasant equation of domineering sex fantasy and sensitivity to the lost and rootless, Chastity isn't any more coherent as a movie: the sexy parts and the serious parts meld into something resembling a teenager's purple diary entry, ultimately trivializing the power of both art and sex and creating something that is simply to howl at. Alessio de Paola's wigged-out direction only jacks up the lurid ludicrousness of the whole enterprise, with lots of faux Nouvelle Vague jump cuts and plaintive shots of Cher running joylessly towards the camera complementing the Rod McKuen-isms of Bono's script. Erotic daydream gets inflated to epic importance as if Stanley Kramer had suddenly merged with Radley Metzger, and one sits stunned at the grandiose foolhardiness of its all. College students, your next drinking game has arrived: a sip for every bad line or misbegotten shot in Chastity. You'll be passed out within 20 minutes.

THE DVD
MGM DVD presents Chastity in fullscreen and "preferable" 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfers on opposite sides of the disc. I suppose there are some nice things going on as far as colour saturation is concerned, though deep blacks have a greenish tinge to them and blurriness is occasionally a problem. If the Dolby 2.0 mono soundtrack is acceptable but slightly soft, the quieter the better, viewers will agree, for Sonny Bono's musical score. A teaser trailer–which unforgettably introduces our heroine with "Meet Chastity: she's a bummer"–is the only extra.

99 minutes; NR; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced), 1.33:1; English DD 2.0 (Mono); CC; English, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; MGM