Sitting room sleaze

Paul Schrader's Auto Focus is a warning to people not to OD on sex aids. The latest morality tale from this Calvinist writer-director, who helped the Hollywood New Wave into the world in the Seventies, concerns a true-life American star of the Sixties, Rob Crane, now as little remembered as the show, Hogan's Heroes, that made him a short-lived celebrity.

He became famous again when his skull was beaten in by - this film presumes - a video whizkid and sleazeball, John Carpenter, who had acted as techno-pimp by providing him with the means to record and enjoy his own orgies.

Casualties of Seventies "liberation", Crane and Carpenter (played here by Greg Kinnear and Willem Dafoe) serve the same purpose as earlier Schrader films, like Hardcore (flesh flicks) and American Gigolo (male prostitution): they exemplify the pervasively sensate US society and the corruption that sexual-commerce inflicts on individuals who binge on it. Schrader's films have an Old Testament ring, a Mosaic comeuppance. Temptation and sin are Auto Focus's, er, focus.

Crane at first is simply a garrulous, laid-back DJ, family man, clockwork Catholic, low on bedroom energy, but high on himself. He gets his break with Hogan's Heroes, a clunky 'Allo! 'Allo-type send-up of PoW movies - like Billy Wilder's Stalag 17 - in which a dumb SS commandant is forever being outwitted by Crane's smarty-pants Yank colonel.

At home, Crane is already into girly mags and nudie pin-ups. Enter Carpenter, who puts the action into the sex by demonstrating Sony's new camcorders and taking him to strip clubs for a trial recording. Soon, sex-play leads to video replay upon replay. Lacking work when Hogan's Heroes' run ends, Crane gets hooked on home-made porn by his slimeball friend.

Each advance in video technology pushes the men to lower depths of prurient experiment. "Sex isn't an answer," Crane is warned, and quips lubriciously: "No, it's a question." But, like holiday snapshots, even an obsession with sex acts in various permutations eventually induces torpor in the voyeur.

The two men, grown listless by looking at the umpteenth bare-assed video of themselves, try to recover the priapic thrill as they sit masturbating side by side, but soon start debating whether this orgy or that one took place in Seattle or Dallas. "Texas," opines Crane, "look at the decor."

If you're eyeballing the decor while balling some broad, you're a sad case. Ironically, they welcome the convenience of newfangled video-timers. Now they can still do sex and not miss The Johnny Carson Show.

Schrader's own characteristic style of fixation-revulsion is kept well under control. Unfamiliarity with Crane's fame or fate may work against this film for British audiences. In fairness, though, seeing Joe Orton having his brains hammered in by his murderously jealous flatmate, Kenneth Halliwell, would probably be a yawn for Americans who've never seen an Orton play.

Auto Focus is an unpleasant, deeply depressing, totally unarousing but intelligent view of the dark side of a film such as Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson's far more fraudulent adventure in the porn trade, which pretended that those who made blue movies were one big happy household, if a tad better endowed than most family members.