PVT Chat review – urban isolation and cam girl obsessions

As films made by digital natives increasingly find their way to screens, the cam girl is bound to become a recurring interest for filmmakers who want to explore questions about the relationship between spectator, subject, and the various levels of performance therein. Ben Hozie’s New York-set PVT Chat finds new avenues for discussion in ideas that have long intrigued cinephiles, even if it winds up falling into a rather exploitative trap.

Jack (Peter Vack) is a professional online Blackjack player on the skids. He pays rent late and pastes cardboard over the fireplace to hold the warmth into his dingy apartment. He spends his days chatting with cam girls online, particularly Scarlet (Julia Fox), a dominatrix who treats him as a “slave.” He pretends to be a wealthy app developer to keep her interested in him. PVT Chat’s title card announces itself as “A romance about freedom fantasy death friendship.” As Jack spots Scarlet in a local bodega and begins to stalk her, the tension between those four descriptors is to be tested.

Scarlet spends most of the film seen through the computer screen. Hozie shoots with wide, digital frames in order to accentuate the isolated body. Close-ups of Jack’s hands caressing the computer mouse neatly explore the relationship between digital desire and physical presence, while the exhilaration of a gambling sequence is undone by the glare of laptop screen, the blank walls of Jack’s apartment. “You use these people, or they use you,” he explains to Scarlet in voiceover, right as he enters a massage parlour in order to get his rocks off. As computer notifications appear onscreen as inter-titles, Hozie shows how urban isolation is nothing in the face of the online matrix.

In a scene at a modern art gallery parodies performative Brooklynites, it's difficult to know how distanced PVT Chat is from its subject. Prominent podcasters and other yuppies du jour cameo to parody themselves or their idea of the art world. A reference to Occupy Wall Street suggests the film’s greater dissatisfaction with compliant capitalism, but the film is both too brief and too secure in its characters’ blinkered viewpoints to really unpack any larger ideas of class consciousness. Fox and Vack are members of the Brooklyn filmmaking class: self-satisfied, self-absorbed, and insular.

Fox was a breakout star of Uncut Gems, and though Hozie explores her onscreen image, she doesn’t get the opportunity to show off much range. When he says “you are making me a better person,” and places a snowglobe on his desk, Hozie ironically dissolves from the globe to Scarlet's face. She is his Rosebud, in case you didn’t notice. But much as Jack only sees her as an unassailable leather venus, the film struggles to find an interior life for Scarlet. When Hozie suddenly cuts into her room, it's jarring not to see her through a screen. This physical transportation prepares us to learn more about Scarlet, but it never comes. She might as well be a Warhol girl: flesh, with a sprinkling of sadness.

PVT Chat is never uninteresting, but you wish the film could find more of a balance between Jack and Scarlet than their sub and dom relationship presents.

PVT is available from 12 February on Curzon Home Cinema.