Las Vegas Weekly

Help Me Eros

Courtesy of CineVegas

Help Me Eros is one of those films that sacrifices a coherent narrative in order to focus exclusively on creating a particular mood, and in so doing, the mood it creates is confusion. Were it not for a lucid synopsis in the CineVegas guide, I would not have understood what the hell was going on in this movie.

Ah Jie (played by writer-director Lee Kang-Sheng) lost his money in the stock market and calls a suicide hotline for consolation. His counselor is an overweight woman, but he imagines she’s the sexy betel-nut stall girl he’s become infatuated with. Eventually, Ah Jie and his sexy crush have a drug-addled affair. That’s what I got from the CineVegas guide.

What I got from the movie is an endless series of gratuitous, arty sex scenes and a lot of drug-induced, spaced-out lounging around—both of which are indie-film clichés. Ah Jie grows marijuana, but considering how over-the-top these characters act when they’re high, what they actually smoke must be some new aphrodisiac wonder drug. Lee does nothing to differentiate between his erotic fantasy sequences and his drugged-out reality sex scenes, so it’s hard to tell which we’re watching. Either way, it’s hard to care.