Orgasms are often thought of as ineffable – so what happens when someone attempts to put the experience into words? In Come, the filmmaker Bronwen Parker-Rhodes, who’s directed a series of short documentaries exploring the oft-unspoken aspects of the female experience, captures several women attempting to do just that, arriving at accounts that encompass the anatomical, metaphoric and poetic realms. Through this exercise, fascinating through lines, contrasts and contradictions emerge. In a single account, the feeling can be characterised as at once deeply embodied yet out-of-body; experienced wholly in one’s own world yet profoundly connected to a partner. Parker-Rhodes intermingles these direct-to-camera accounts with abstract, hand-drawn visual interludes provided by her mother, the animator Erica Russell. The resulting collage is strikingly direct while hinting at an experience that seems to exist almost beyond description.
The filmmakers who transform fantasies into videos with an audience of one
Directed by Chung Nguyen
