Magic Mike

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Cody Horn, Alex Pettyfer, Channing Tatum, Matt Bomer, Joe Manganiello

Year: 2012

Country: USA

Author Review: Roberto Matteucci

In the morning, Mike wakes up in his grandiose Florida beach house. He is nude, shows his mighty muscles. He is talking to a girl who is also naked. From the dialogue we understand that between them there is just for one night-stand relation. Then they turn, there's another naked girl on the bed. "What is her name?" they wonder. None of them knows the name of the third one. Mike dresses, he prays the girl to close the house before leaving and goes to work. Mike is a construction worker.

It is the symbolic departure of Magic Mike directed by Steven Soderbergh. The film is an exaltation of masculine nude , an orgy of muscles, the pectorals are exciting, hormones wander freely. The cinema audience is totally feminine. The few men hide shameful. And it's a pity, because the movie is beautiful, exciting and well-shot.

We know the diurnal work of Mike but when the night comes for Mike is time to begin his second job: the stripper for excited and desirous women. He works in a striper male club just for women, the owner is Dallas. Mike is his precious piece. Along with a group of virile muscular guys, every night dance on stage, simulating to show the voluptuous penis and its mighty back.

In his daytime work he met young and athletic Adam. He will introduce him into the striptease business. They will become friends. Their friendship will be the detonator of the story. Their relationship will provoke the explosion of the fantastic and ephemeral world of the masculine nude, beautiful in appearance but empty to the inside.

The roles between the two will turn over. The mature Mike will acquire a series of weaknesses and uncertainties. While Adam will replace him because he is a desirous little boy who wants to have fun. The narrative is not just a parade of bodies to satisfy the eye of horny women. The scenes of ballets, striptease, simulation of erotic games, or false sexual encounter, contain big part of the film, but it is structural to the story of the friendship among the two boys. . They are two opposites, first attract and then separate

At the time of his capitulation, Mike declares his innocence "I am not my job": he looks up on his iPhone the number of a girl to call. Browse the contacts, he is uncertain because he doesn't have friends; it is the metaphor of his great solitude in spite his success. He would not want a mere fucking night, he would want somebody to share a feeling.

Call a girl, she invites him to reach her house. When they meet Mike looks for a dialogue, but she rebukes him: "You do not have to talk." Mike has only one other purpose, he is an object woman's. The world is upside down. The females have emancipated, acquired rights and freedom of choice. Therefore, they choose men as subjects of merely pleasure.

The director gives his best in nightclub setting. He can exalt the various characters, using the physical and carnal element, and wide shot, till describing many details included every particular of the body.

When the drug enters in the story, the vision will be less free, something is broken. Friendship is breaking. Mike feels the need to look like "people living in the light of day" wants to come back to love, to feel free mentally, wants to fall in love. He is tired of his physical freedom, it is time to leave the place, it is time to change life.

There is also sarcasm on women. Women laugh incessantly, in the film they are described as hysterical, neurotic, always open mouth during the boys' demonstrations. The director mocks them, reproaching them in the most absurd, deformed ways. The director is severe with the boys and their job, but he is also tough with women. Why have they fought so hard to get freedom? To see a naked man?

When Adam enters the first time in the boys' dressing room, he sees, one of the dancers, uses the vacuum pump to enlarge his penis. He looks amazed, intimidated, almost scared, while Mike feels well in his habitat.

Moral closure is always in the same place. Mike enters again in dressing room, he's reflecting, he's thinking. He looks off-screen, and we can see alternatively Dallas - while playing his show among the applause of the girls - and on Adam, who laughs and jokes in the dressing room, he's already the new king. It is the delivery passage between the two guys.