A Julia Fox erot­ic dra­ma explores dom­i­na­tion and dig­i­tal life

In one of the more atten­tion-grab­bing open­ings in recent mem­o­ry, PVT Chat begins with a cli­max, open­ing on a young man, Jack (Peter Vack), in a dingy apart­ment, mas­tur­bat­ing dur­ing a one-to-one ses­sion with leather-clad cam­girl Scar­let (Julia Fox). They’re par­tic­i­pat­ing in role­play, Scar­let com­mand­ing Jack to lick her boot and swal­low the cig­a­rette end she push­es towards her webcam.

Scar­let says she lives in San Fran­cis­co, while Jack lives in New York City. Dur­ing their deep­en­ing night­ly con­ver­sa­tions where they get to know each oth­er, Jack tells her he works in tech and wax­es lyri­cal about his rev­o­lu­tion­ary app idea. In fact, his ​‘pro­fes­sion’ is as an online black­jack play­er, using his wild­ly incon­sis­tent earn­ings to pay for his Scar­let time at night, while bull­shit­ting his way into con­stant rent defer­rals for his tat­tered room and liv­ing off cheap noodles.

One night at a Chi­na­town bode­ga, Jack sees a woman from afar who looks just like Scar­let. The valid­i­ty of the sight­ing is lat­er con­firmed by one of his burnout bud­dies, played by anoth­er Safdie broth­ers alum­ni, Bud­dy Duress, near the same bode­ga. On that note, PVT Chat is writ­ten and direct­ed by Ben Hozie, mem­ber of punk band Bode­ga, with his fel­low vocal­ist Nik­ki Belfiglio appear­ing onscreen in a sup­port­ing role.

Giv­en the cur­rent­ly small pool of cam­girl-cen­tred fea­tures in the world, one might read a syn­op­sis for PVT Chat and think of the Blum­house-backed 2018 hor­ror Cam. Writ­ten by for­mer cam­girl Isa Mazzei and direct­ed by Daniel Gold­haber, Cam fol­lows Alice, who puts on night­ly shows rather than par­tic­i­pat­ing in pri­vate ses­sions and dis­cov­ers that her account has been tak­en over by an exact dig­i­tal repli­ca of her­self. Told entire­ly from Alice’s POV, Cam fea­tures a scene where she meets up with one of her biggest-tip­ping reg­u­lar view­ers, who’s been eager to chat in real life, as part of her detec­tive work to solve her dop­pel­gänger dilemma.

PVT Chat almost plays like a rever­sal of that thread of Cam, telling a sto­ry from the view­point of an overea­ger fan who wants to con­nect to his crush out­side of a screen, seem­ing­ly inca­pable of end­ing a web of lies he spins to make the idea seem plau­si­ble to her, if her pro­ject­ed affec­tion and inter­est is real­ly sin­cere. While the shift in per­spec­tive is a brief jolt when watch­ing, it’s not a spoil­er to say that, rough­ly halfway through, Hozie takes the nar­ra­tive away from sole­ly Jack’s POV and allows us to see Scarlet’s world from her side of things.

We don’t get a sense of Scarlet’s cam­ming rap­port with patrons out­side of Jack, but her one-to-one ses­sions with him back up the adver­tise­ment on her mod­el page: ​“Dom­i­na­tion is my spe­cial­i­ty.” Dur­ing the press tour for Uncut Gems, Fox men­tioned that dom­i­na­trix work was part of her own his­to­ry, and that auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal detail adds an extra lay­er to her role in PVT Chat. The film’s explo­ration of bond­ing through kinks also brings to mind Finnish film­mak­er J‑P Valkeapää’s recent Dogs Don’t Wear Pants, which con­cerns the bur­geon­ing rela­tion­ship between a wid­owed man and a dom­i­na­trix, albeit in-per­son rather than online.

Like Dogs Don’t Wear Pants, PVT Chat refrains from pathol­o­gis­ing, sen­sa­tion­al­is­ing or mock­ing prac­ti­tion­ers and par­tic­i­pants of the activ­i­ties exhib­it­ed, though nei­ther shy away from cer­tain scuzzy fac­tors. Clear-cut moral­is­ing would have been an easy route, espe­cial­ly giv­en the unhealthy and crim­i­nal activ­i­ty Jack even­tu­al­ly engages in. But Hozie doesn’t make the psy­chol­o­gy of either lead char­ac­ter easy to pin down. He instead rev­els in the com­plex­i­ties of gen­uine inti­ma­cy in an age of dig­i­tal trans­ac­tions and con­stant stim­u­la­tion, where even in moments of a poten­tial hook-up, or in one case dur­ing an apart­ment break-in, peo­ple are inclined to pause to check their emails.

PVT Chat plays as part of Fan­ta­sia Inter­na­tion­al Film Festival’s dig­i­tal edi­tion on 25 August. For more info vis­it fan​tasi​afes​ti​val​.com