Angela (Shari Solanis) embodies the qualities of a woman set free. She is self-sufficient intellectually, emotionally, sexually and financially. She picks the men she would like to have, in her life and otherwise, like the books she keeps on her shelf: Reich on psychology, a treatise on Chi power. A lover from Nicaragua who roams the world as a journalist. A wanted trader, seemingly the main protagonist (James Keller Northam's Bill) who decides to flee to Nicaragua, the country the violence of which she left for a better life as an illegal immigrant in LA where she works as a nurse.
Embodying that implausible archetype of female eros 'set free' to conform, in Phillippe Diaz's film, to the male fantasy of the strong woman who wants nothing more than lovingly dominate a man, expose him to his hidden desires to serve her needs and expose his weaknesses and fears, but ultimately offering him all the bells and whistles of no strings attached intimacy.
An abandoned menage a trois cannot rise to more than a faint premonition of what Gaspar Noé would achieve so masterfully in Love a few years later. But it stands as perhaps the best example of Now and Later's fascination with the normalisation of sexuality as a main staple of everyday life, which some critics have mistaken for an unfortunate slip into soft pornography.
The underlying motif, that of living in the moment versus blindly falling forward in strive, may be sailing very close to kitsch but there remains an unapologetic authenticity in Solanis's and Northam's acting that gives this film its unexpected sparkle and mystery. Diaz is far from the pinacle of achievement in breathing fresh life into the well worn common places of cinematic voyeurism and politico-critical subtext. Now and Later nevertheless stands as a valid citation of these clichés in ways that not many other films have dared to attempt in such disarming lack of pretence.
Embodying that implausible archetype of female eros 'set free' to conform, in Phillippe Diaz's film, to the male fantasy of the strong woman who wants nothing more than lovingly dominate a man, expose him to his hidden desires to serve her needs and expose his weaknesses and fears, but ultimately offering him all the bells and whistles of no strings attached intimacy.
An abandoned menage a trois cannot rise to more than a faint premonition of what Gaspar Noé would achieve so masterfully in Love a few years later. But it stands as perhaps the best example of Now and Later's fascination with the normalisation of sexuality as a main staple of everyday life, which some critics have mistaken for an unfortunate slip into soft pornography.
The underlying motif, that of living in the moment versus blindly falling forward in strive, may be sailing very close to kitsch but there remains an unapologetic authenticity in Solanis's and Northam's acting that gives this film its unexpected sparkle and mystery. Diaz is far from the pinacle of achievement in breathing fresh life into the well worn common places of cinematic voyeurism and politico-critical subtext. Now and Later nevertheless stands as a valid citation of these clichés in ways that not many other films have dared to attempt in such disarming lack of pretence.