There’s something poignant about watching a group of women in a hair salon discussing why they cannot have orgasms. One is almost motivated to go out and offer oneself up for the gratification of the orgasmically challenged.
Surely there can be no more noble a task than devoting enough care and patience to giving others satisfaction?
One gets the feeling that many of the issues in 4Play: Sex Tips for Girls could be resolved if the men in the relationships portrayed weren’t quite so absent from the equation.
Co-parenting, like lovemaking, is based on power-sharing and experimentation to see what works for both parties.
The series, which airs on e.tv on Tuesday at 9pm, is educational and funded by the Johns Hopkins Health and Education in South Africa initiative. However, it manages to rise above its airing station.
What we have is a light-hearted human drama revolving around four women: a chunky but sensuous hairdresser (Portia Gumede); a to-die-for, sexy, BEE housewife (Kgomotso Christopher); a young township singer who is something of a dreamer (Mbali Maphumulo); and a lonely white girl who messes things up because she’s a bit too caught up in her drinking (Tiffany Jones).
Director Amanda Lane and her creative team (scriptwriters under Minky Schlesinger) have managed to construct a picture of Johannesburg that is far from gritty and nauseating. This is not the city we’ve become used to in educational television (similar to the Jo’burg we saw in films such as Tsotsi, District 9 and Jerusalema). There’s something wildly contemporary about 4Play and it borrows what it needs from the current craze for the garish, glossy Eighties.
In episode 2, Nox, the well-to-do housewife, joins a pole-dancing class to save her marriage. On the pole (or is that up the pole?), she bumps into her white high school headgirl and a friendship is rekindled. There are echoes of early Almodovar, but these women aren’t that startlingly individualistic (although they are probably designed to be so). A general concern, and this is embedded in the message, is that they define themselves in relation to their failing heterosexual relationships. Somehow each needs to find her path beyond emotional dependency.
4Play is fresh, provocative and alluring. It’s tailor-made for today’s city women (as opposed to men) and that’s why there is more talk about sex than hot action.
The men used to wait up until midnight — after their wives had gone to sleep — to get their fix on e.tv. One will have to check out whether that still happens.