99 Moons movie storyline. Bigna, a twenty-eight-year-old scientist, is used to having everything under control, but her sex life is enshrouded in secrecy. Thirty-three-year-old Frank searches for meaning in a haze of drugs and feeds on other people’s affection. Two opposites who meet by chance and become obsessively entwined in a passionate affair.
99 Moons is a Swiss erotic drama film directed by Jan Gassmann and starring Valentina Di Pace, Dominik Fellmann, Danny Exnar, Jessica Huber, Lia J. von Blarer, Gregory Hari, Ale Lindman, Kathrin Schweizer and Katerina Stoykova. The screenplay was written by Jan Gassmann. The film was released on March 10, 2023 by Strand Releasing in the United States.
Film Review for 99 Moons
With 99 Moons, Swiss director Jan Gassmann is, in a certain sense, continuing a conversation on intimacy and relationships which he first started with his previous film Europe, She Loves, which follows four couples spread out in four European cities. Presented in a world premiere within the 75th Cannes Film Festival’s ACID selection, 99 Moons leaves the documentary form behind to tell the tale of Bigna and Frank, two thirty-year-olds with very different lives who find themselves wrestling with a mutual attraction which is as unexpected as it is overwhelming, an attraction so strong that it shakes their convictions and shatters the image of the relationships they’d imagined for themselves.
Jan Gassmann’s latest feature film depicts two thirty-year-olds: Bigna, a scientific researcher specialising in tsunamis who’s about to head to Chile for a long-dreamt-of research programme, and Frank, a typical hipster whose main interests are parties, chatting with friends until dawn and artificial paradises. What seems to set them apart, besides their lifestyles, but which ultimately brings them close together, are their ideas about desire and relationships.
Whereas Bigna (played by Valentina Di Pace, taking her first steps as an actress) feels the need to organise her one-night-stands in minute detail, unfolding role-play-style between strangers and transforming her into a ruthless dominatrix, Frank (Dominik Fellmann, also making his debut as an actor) appears trapped in his role as a seemingly open cisgender man who’s actually suffocated by stereotypes which would have him dominant and which proclaim the supremacy of penetration.
It’s difficult for him to admit the desire and excitement he feels for these role-play games in which he (voluntarily) assumes a subordinate position. This realisation, in some respects painful and destabilising, leads him to question an entire value system: the exaltation of the heterosexual and monogamous couple and the notion of a virile and all-conquering masculinity. Despite his open-mindedness, he finds it far harder to leave traditional gender roles behind him than he imagined. Bigna, meanwhile, has to take a good hard look at her own rules and consider breaking them on account of an attraction which it would be reductive to describe as “love”.
Jan Gassmann depicts Bigna and Frank’s story in chapters, which are composed of meet-ups and abandonments unfolding over the course of eight years plus. Eight years in which their questioning never stops and their desire refuses to be extinguished, mutating into veritable obsession. Although both of them try, both separately and together, to take the road of heteronormativity, it always seems to lead to a dead end. That which draws them together, however, seems intimately linked to a freedom and union which can’t (and don’t want to) be harnessed, something unique which belongs only to them, and which Gassmann is quick to depict in direct and full-on sex scenes which challenge our habits as viewers.
What is it that differentiates sex from love? Is it really possible to dictate common rules for every couple? What if these dictates, and the inability to freely choose our own rules, were the source of our ruin? These are just a few of the questions which Gassmann tries to tackle, jeopardising an equilibrium which defines society itself.
99 Moons (2023)
Directed by: Jan Gassmann
Starring: Valentina Di Pace, Dominik Fellmann, Danny Exnar, Jessica Huber, Lia J. von Blarer, Gregory Hari, Ale Lindman, Kathrin Schweizer, Katerina Stoykova
Screenplay by: Jan Gassmann
Cinematography by: Yunus Roy Imer
Film Editing by: Miriam Maerk
Costume Design by: Sophie Reble
Makeup Department: Marina Aebi, Simone Enkerli
Music by: Michelle Gurevich
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Strand Releasing
Release Date: March 10, 2023
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