Breasts
Film Reviewed by Kam Williams

Headline: 22 Topless Women Talk about Their Boobs

 

Breasts - A Documentary (1996)
Click to order via Amazon

Unrated
Running time: 50 minutes

Distributor: First Run Features Home Video
DVD Extras: Interviews with the directors, 30 minutes of bonus footage, a photo gallery, and original music tracks.

DVD Review by Kam Williams Excellent (4 stars)

What do women feel about their breasts? This question occurred to Meema Spadola, who decided to do a little research and share it with the world.

209 people (including one male) responded to her invitation to bare their bosoms on camera while answering probing questions about their boobs as regards their puberty, sexuality, motherhood, health and aging.

The intrepid filmmaker then settled on 22 of the respondents and shot Breasts, a daring documentary about a female’s most public of private parts.

Despite the incessant parade of pectorals, the movie is not at all salacious in tone, primarily because the interviewees, invariably, take the task at hand so seriously. Consequently, Breasts offers an eye-opening peek, pardon the expression, for anyone interested in appreciating the totality of a woman’s experiences associated with this part of her anatomy.

The film features the remarks of a model, a writer, two mother-daughter sets, a morbidly obese comedienne, an 11 year-old in a training bra, an 84 year-old with a double mastectomy, another breast cancer survivor with just a single scar, a breast reduction, a couple of topless dancers with implants, and a formerly flat-chested woman who regrets going from a 28AA to a 34C, because of how silicone has compromised her health. Furthermore, she explains that she feels foolish for having undergone the procedure, since she would be left concave, if she now had the plastic bags removed.

Most of the participants in the survey are much more positive about their bosoms, whether discussing the pleasures of breast feeding or the power it enables them to wield over the opposite sex. As one of the strippers describes it, the moment guys see breasts, they forget everything else. ’All men drool. I know the moment the top comes off, I’m in control.

Male tendencies toward mastoconcupiscence* aside, Breasts is a movie that does a great service by presenting the female form from a perspective which de-eroticizes mammary glands, while fully humanizing the women behind the bosoms.

* Defined as an unnatural obsession with breasts.

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