Taking a slight title inspiration from A Passage to India, David Lean’s final film which had been a critical and box office success the year before, Bob Chinn’s A Passage to Ecstasy is a bedroom-hopping drama from 1985 that is set amid an anniversary party in a sprawling mansion in Bombay (now Mumbai). Chinn directs a mature, naturalistic script by Debbie Chinn (using her usual nom de porn of Deborah Sullivan) that works as both an adult movie where not a lot happens but the sex but also one where there is sense of a real emotional circle closing as the day passes; even if it’s a film in which almost every single encounter, save the last one, feels like filler in the service of a story that feels a little warmed over.
Julia (Josephine Carrington) and Charlie Barrows are celebrating their fourth wedding anniversary in Bombay. Guests to the party are Donald (Eric Edwards) and his new girlfriend, Bridget (Buffy Davis); Donald’s friend and attorney, Paul Shankar (Herschel Savage); Julia’s best friend, Leslie (Stacey Donavan), and her husband, Jeffery Rothstein (Harry Reems); and Carl Thomas (Greg Derek) and Anna Wong (Kristara Barrington), herself the daughter of a one-time whorehouse proprietor in the vicinity. Arriving stag are Sydney (Peter North), a perpetually tipsy friend of the Barrows, and Edie Smith (Honey Wilder), a fried chicken magnate who is also known as Miss Scarlet Chicken and is currently in Bombay getting over a high profile fling with a maharaja. As the day wears on, we come to realize that there is something amiss with the celebrating couple and that Julia is going through a personal crossroads.
Films like A Passage to Ecstasy show the mighty forces at war in the adult film industry at the time. With the pressures of home video affecting not only budgets but content, story-based filmmakers like Bob Chinn had quite a needle to thread to produce features that weren’t completely disposable and retained a shred of artistic integrity. So, like Blondie, there is a core idea at play that allows for many dugouts in which people can partner up. To that end, Chinn crams A Passage to Ecstasy with a buffet table of sex scenes but still manages to get some nice straightforward material where he can find it which is really well-realized, mostly insightful, and dramatically satisfying.
Like Blondie, A Passage to Ecstasy deals with hurt, neglected, or maltreated women who take sexual charge and fuck the blues away. In Blondie, this was the major conceit with all of the central characters; sex WAS the liberating act which also bolstered and underlined the theme of the film. It is less the case here, and aside from being a little at odds with itself as some of it plays like a farce (I mean, Harry Reems gets his hand superglued to his his crotch AND there’s a character named Bridget Boobzadarian), its abundance of inconsequential secondary characters slightly handicaps the whole. For at the core of A Passage to Ecstasy is a decent drama about the transition in its lead character’s life that’s both well-acted and classily dressed-up. But its inclusion of folks who do nothing but show up and screw reveal too much of the works and makes it feel like one of those star-studded Neil Simon omnibus films of the late 70’s. Long and plentiful sex scenes were what distributors and producers insisted upon as the Golden Age drew to a close and home video became the major delivery network for adult features and, with the Derek/Barrington and Edwards/Davis moments, that edict certainly is in full relief here. This is doubly apparent as the two encounters are stacked atop each other in the story, but at the very least, Edwards and Davis’s characters have a proper entrance and exit from the story; Barrington and Derek have sex and disappear almost as if the house is possessed and took them as a sacrifice.
But everything that’s right in A Passage to Ecstasy is very right. Debbie Chinn’s scripts really did add a distinct layer and depth to Bob’s films of the 80’s and she had a real skill for articulating real frustrations within the dialogue she wrote for her female characters. Combined with his care for the actors who had to deliver that dialogue is what caused their personal and professional partnership to be very unique (the best example of which is 1986’s Losing Control). Also nice is the credibly thick and steamy atmosphere Chinn is able to conjure by simply cutting in stock footage during the transitions and utilizing an appropriately low-key musical score by Y. Chung Yu. Tom Morton’s photography is well-lit and refined and captures the right mood for each piece of the action.
Regardless of whether they actually do anything for the story, all of the sex scenes are nice and come off as medium to hot, most especially the final scene between Walker and Carrington. But Honey Wilder being Honey Wilder causes her to take over the show and, man, she’s just one big ball of fun in this. From her dialogue, to her facial expressions, to her ass plant in the bathroom sink while being serviced by Peter North, she’s just delightful and proves that could play the gay divorcee just as well as Juliet Anderson ever could.
In terms of performances, Wilder, Eric Edwards, Stacy Donavan, and Josephine Carrington all shine in A Passage to Ecstasy but Herschel Savage is the true standout. Here he shows a tender and loving side as Paul Shankar who is clearly smitten with Julia and who almost immediately understands that something is wrong, but gives her the space to process and come to terms with it before their climactic coupling (which, as stated before, is fabulous). Though he gets overlooked a great deal in favor of his higher profile male peers of the time, Savage was an underrated utility player who could really bring some chops to whatever straightforward or dramatic parts he was able to snag.
Though it’s lost and mostly forgotten in the shuffling whirlpool of titles that Chinn cranked out in the waning days of his first career in filmmaking, A Passage to Ecstasy is probably better than 3/4th of the Hyapatia Lee/Caribbean material made two years prior and is well worth worth seeking out. Produced on 16mm film, it at least deserves much better than what’s suggested by its video-imprinted credits, which carelessly misspells both the title of the film and Stacey Donovan’s name. For A Passage to Ecstasy may not break any new ground, but it’s pretty fun when it works and, at the very least, isn’t boring when it doesn’t.
(C) Copyright 2023, Patrick Crain
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