“That was such a strange dream. I was in this big, empty house,” says the girl, in a light Croydon accent. “I was lying on the floor and there was a chalk mark around my body — like in a crime scene. I got up, but it was like I floated up. My body was weightless.” Now the girl, womanly but slight, and still in a state of undress, is in the hallway of a building. It’s dark, but you can just make her out as she walks towards a grand, winding staircase and begins to climb. She moves so gracefully, she could be floating. There is nobody else around — just shadows.
“I could hear the sound of the sea, big waves crashing, and I could also hear some music somewhere, like someone was having a party. The music was coming from one of the rooms. One of the doors opened and a woman came out. ‘You’re Miss X, right?’”
The girl is in an unlit corridor. “She said ‘It’s okay to go in now’, and I did what she told me and opened the door and went in. It was dark, but I wasn’t frightened. I closed the door behind me and stood in the middle of the room. The room was full of shadows, then the shadows started moving — and then there were all of these flashes of light, like a strobe light in a club, except that they were coming from the shadows.”
She is talking to camera now. All of a sudden, the girl’s voice changes, becoming much deeper and slower, like an old 78 record played at the wrong speed. “Are you Miss X?” she asks, as if possessed. There is the thud of a flash bulb and light bleaches her out.
We’ve seen a lot of Kate Moss this past year, so why does it always seem like it’s not enough? Her latest outing is no exception, another glimpse of the woman we like to think we know so much about, but of whom we actually know very little. She has made her film debut in a four-minute dream sequence for the lingerie brand Agent Provocateur (the first of four shorts she has made for the company). Over the coming months, you’ll be able to see them all for free on the Agent Provocateur website — and in the third, you can watch her take her clothes off.
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The director is the movie veteran Mike Figgis, who did Leaving Las Vegas. It was filmed over two nights in a mansion on London’s Portland Place. The supermodel was, apparently, extremely nervous on set, smoking like a trouper. Well, for a girl who — bar the odd mobile-phone ad — has done almost everything but talk on camera, who has consistently and steadfastly hidden behind her own lovely image, stepping in front of Figgis’s lens for a speaking role must have felt like a bold manoeuvre.
“She was insecure about her voice,” says Figgis, who fixed the mike so close to her mouth, it’s as if she’s there on the pillow beside you. “But she’s got a nice voice.”
Indeed she has. It’s sweetly singsong, the south London vowels softened by the fashion merry-go-round. “The hardest part was the first 10 minutes. It was just us in the room, and pitch black, because I was using night vision. I tried to create a comfort zone by telling her I was nervous too. She asked questions, gained confidence. We got there.”
As a brand, saucy is Agent Provocateur’s big thing. It has done a film with Figgis before — Tied up at the Office — featuring girls getting it on after hours in one of the shops. And there was that Kylie promo — La Minogue riding her bucking bronco into sexual oblivion. Not to mention the photographic books, CDs, books of erotic fiction.
Moss has never been shy about taking off her clothes, playing on her sexualised image throughout her career. So far, the apex has been a Sofia Coppola-directed video for the White Stripes, in which she was a lap dancer sliding provocatively — and convincingly — around a pole. Those lessons with Sadie Frost paid off.
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But the question is: why did she decide to break into erotic film now? When Agent Provocateur approached her, she laughed and said she was surprised they hadn’t asked her before. Officially, though, she gives two reasons — the director, and the knickers. “I leapt at the chance to work with Mike Figgis for Agent Provocateur, as it’s the only lingerie I wear.”
Moss’s relationship with Agent Provocateur goes way back — she and its founders, Serena Rees and Joe Corre, have been working the scene together for more than a decade. “We were all excited about doing this,” says Corre. “It’s a London thing, a British thing. We’re home-grown, we’ve got British humour, ballsiness. We say what we think. Kate responds to that.”
It was a risk, of course. But nothing would have got past Moss if she hadn’t been happy with it. “The films look amazing, and I’m thrilled with the result,” she says. Did she do it for the money? An undisclosed sum was involved, but it can hardly have been the motivating factor — not when she’s said to have pulled in £10m in advertising fees this year alone. Exposure? She’s everywhere already. Paparazzi shots of her and Pete go for £50,000 each these days.
Or was it that there just wasn’t a reason not to? Middle England is up in arms over Moss’s moral turpitude. She dates the country’s most notorious drug addict; rides her own scandals; is still relentlessly living the party lifestyle that sections of the media rail against. In short, she has it all absolutely and utterly her own way.
Perhaps the film is Moss’s response to her critics. It sits nicely alongside the current cover of Vanity Fair, which she graces in nothing but a white fox hat, white gloves and black boots, as well as her reported audition for the lead in a biopic about Paula Yates and Michael Hutchence. Bad girl.
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Understated and not at all dumb, Figgis’s film is a lesson in the power of suggestion. It isn’t at all filthy — you don’t actually see anything — but it’s sexy. Partly because of the illicit thrill delivered by the sight of a walking, talking, semi-clothed Moss having what appears to be an erotic dream. And partly because it poses more questions than it resolves. One of them is, just how do women like their porn? (Answer: no graphic close-ups, please.)
It’s a signal that the dearth of female-friendly erotica is finally being addressed. “Porn’s all fake tits and crap story lines,” says Rees. Figgis agrees: “If there was more about the women in porn films, it would work better for men, too, because the sexual charge comes from the woman.”
And this time, not just any woman, but the world’s most notorious playgirl. “At the end, I said to Kate, ‘Listen, you’re okay as an actress,’” says Figgis. “She’s got this understanding of herself and the way she projects. That’s why this film is sexy. It isn’t just anyone in knickers. It’s her in knickers.”
SOMETHING FOR THE GIRLS
Victoria Gill on the avent of posh porn
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Feral man does buxom girl from behind: it’s the classic 20th-century porn format, made by men, for men. But things are changing in the porn world, largely in response to the fastest-growing sector of its customer base — women. The hype surrounding the recent films Nine Songs, Romance and Baise-moi, all of which feature unsimulated sex, signify the public is ready for it.
Film companies such as Orchid are responding to the new female demand by making porn centred around fashion (think bending over in Balenciaga), but it still seems a long way off the mark in terms of what women actually want — more narrative, more imagination and better scripts would be nice.
More interesting, perhaps, is the continuing crossover between art and porn. This month sees the cinema release of Destricted, a series of short films by artists and directors such as Sam Taylor-Wood, Marina Abramovich and Larry Clark. Cerebral erotica for the visually aware? You be the judge: Abramovich’s movie features Balkan villagers in their full glory, Clark’s a coy boy selecting a mature madam to deflower him. Posh porn is just getting started — and it won’t be only for the blokes.
To see the first film, visit www.agentprovocateur.com