Dermis, Anyone?

An Affair of the Skin just misses being a first-class parody of the foreign art films that inspired it. Purporting to show "the realism of grownup, contemporary sex" in America--not in England or France or Italy--Producer-Writer-Director Ben Maddow (The Savage Eye) serves up a mannered little pastiche of urban infidelities that is pure counterfeit. Husband Kevin McCarthy can't stand shrewish Wife Lee Grant, so he takes up with Model Viveca Lindfors, who is the mistress of his best friend Herbert Berghof. Rounding out the quintet, for no discernible reason except to exploit interracial dalliance, is Diana Sands as a footloose Negro photographer.

To the twanging accompaniment of background music that would better fit a Kabuki drama, these five bleeding hearts go the way of all flesh. En route, they converse in quaint prose poems reminiscent of haiku:

"You cried."

"Well, you kept kissing me."

"I think tears are awful, they taste like poison."

"You have cold toenails."

That's the art part, not the realism. Because art is weird dialogue. Art is shooting scenes through leafy boughs or stark bare branches. Art is two people bare-shouldering each other around on a bed. And realism is dingy. Dingy slums, dingy parties, dingy cuss words.

Here and there, interesting camera work gives the film a professional gloss. But even such seasoned performers as Lindfors and Berghof falter before the pervasive foolishness of a script that asks them to say:

"What did you tell him?"

"The truth."

"What truth?"

"That we're going to be married."

"Did you sleep with him first--or afterwards?"

"Both."

This brand of grownup, contemporary sex probably won't shock an audience of contemporary American grownups, but it may well have them asking one another: Where did you go? Way out. What did you see? Nothing.

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