“A bucket of worms.” That is one eyewitness description in Mathew Kaufman and Jon Hart’s documentary “American Swing” of the orgiastic inner sanctum known as the mattress room in Plato’s Retreat, the notorious Manhattan swingers’ club that opened in January 1977 and closed on New Year’s Eve in 1985. A vintage clip in the documentary, which is based on a 2002 article by Mr. Hart in The New York Times, confirms that image. The sea of naked bodies observed from a middle distance resembles nothing so much as a heaving sea of termites.
This fleeting glimpse of a mass orgy is the only genuinely disturbing image in “American Swing,” which interweaves reminiscences of onetime patrons with grainy, bleached-out scenes of party life inside the club at various points in its history along with the story of its founder, Larry Levenson. At the peak of the club’s popularity, Mr. Levenson, who boasted of having sex with as many as 10 women a night, was nicknamed the King of Swing. In clips from television interviews with Phil Donahue and David Susskind, Mr. Levenson comes across as a cheerfully messianic promoter of orgy-porgy freedom and enlightenment.
Like the owners of Studio 54, which flourished during the same era, Mr. Levenson and two other owners were convicted of tax evasion in 1981. After serving three years in Allenwood Federal Prison, he returned to Plato’s, which in 1980 had relocated from the Ansonia on the Upper West Side to a warehouse on West 34th Street. By this time its novelty had faded, and it had become a hub of prostitution. The AIDS epidemic was the final nail in the coffin. Mr. Levenson fell on hard times and died in January 1999.
Although “American Swing” pointedly goes out of its way to include positive testimonials from several women who patronized the club, it leaves you feeling queasy. Memories of hot times, after all, are just that: memories
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Источник: New York Times
IMDB: 5.7/10
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