"Secretary"

What has really happened is that Lee has tapped into the deepest corners of her most private self -- forget whether it's a self that you or I or anyone else approves of. What matters is that she no longer feels compelled to cut herself. She begins to dress differently and carry herself more confidently; she indulges in erotic daydreams in which she and Mr. Grey dally in a landscape of bright blue skies and psychedelic orchids. And in real life, her desire transmutes at first into something like love, and then into love itself, which complicates and threatens the fragile relationship.

If you're familiar with Gaitskill's story, Shainberg's movie isn't going to be the one you expect. A less imaginative filmmaker might have done the story a disservice by turning it into a grim little realist picture, with closeups of fingernails bitten to the quick and seedy-looking office interiors furnished with grayed-out file cabinets and workaday swivel chairs. Shainberg knows instinctively that Gaitskill's story isn't about sexual aberration but about a peculiar and precious kind of understanding between two people. In adapting it, he has expanded it, fleshed it out, reimagined it, essentially recasting it as a fairy tale about erotic love. In its ultimate rush of honest feeling, if not always in its tone, it resembles the lovely and little-seen Canadian picture "Kissed," about a woman who yearns to make love with bodies that are no longer alive. (To call "Kissed" a movie about a necrophiliac is like calling "Moby-Dick" a book about a whale.)

Shainberg and cinematographer Steven Fierberg render the movie in colors that are soft-edged but saturated -- they're vivid, but instead of popping off the screen, they seem to hover just beneath its surface, like bright undersea flora and fauna. Shainberg's narrative style seems overly efficient and deliberate at the beginning, but you quickly see how it serves the story: In their confusion and tentativeness, the characters are always taking two steps forward and one step back. Shainberg's comfortingly methodic storytelling works as a mirror of the elusive orderliness that Lee and Mr. Grey desperately seek in their own lives.

"Secretary" hinges on the interplay between Gyllenhaal and Spader: The two of them do the classic romantic-comedy advance-and-retreat so beautifully that it feels like something they've built together -- a strong, invisible core for the movie -- rather than simply a case of good actors responding well to one another. Spader plays Mr. Grey like a one-man mystery unfolding before us -- we start out being wary of him, for good reason (his need for control isn't always pretty), and we warm to him only gradually, not quite knowing how to read his sudden and puzzling blurts of kindness. When he expresses concern for Lee, or curiosity about her, it's like an electrical current jerking through him. At one point he scrutinizes her and says, "There's something about you. You're closed up, you're tight ... Do you ever open up?" (To which she responds, simply and with no pretense of evasion, "I don't know.") Spader gives a sensational performance, building it out of fragile, shaky layers. It's the only way for an actor to earn sympathy for a closed-off man: If you reveal too much too soon, his guardedness amounts to nothing.

Gyllenhaal, because her character allows it, wins our sympathy almost immediately. It's painful to watch her disfigure herself, which is precisely why it's so joyous to watch her lose herself in the sex games she plays with Mr. Grey: You want nothing but relief for this suffering character, and if spanking offers it, then why shouldn't she have as much as she wants? Gyllenhaal's performance is a direct challenge to anyone who would dare pass judgment on the movie's sexual morality. How can we shake our heads in shame and pity for Lee when she's clearly having the time of her life? Neither the movie nor Gyllenhaal's performance allows for that kind of superiority. Gyllenhaal's Betty Boop eyes reflect the cartoony playfulness of Lee and Mr. Grey's verbal and sexual interplay. But they also show us the intimacy that's building between them, an intimacy bred of both loneliness and unnameable desires. Pass judgment on their actions if you absolutely must. But as Gyllenhaal and Spader play these characters, there's no way to pass judgment on their loneliness and isolation. The movie's ultimate question is, are we going to let ourselves get hung up on sex at the expense of our empathy? And if we do, what kind of human beings are we?

Whether or not you understand or respond to these characters' specific kinks is beside the point. "Secretary" isn't ultimately about spanking, submissiveness, humiliation, domination or shame -- it's too funny and delicate to be summed up so conveniently or judgmentally. Terrific sex may be hard to come by in this world, but tenderness and understanding are infinitely harder: The great tragedy of being human is that we want them all.

If you're sensitive to spoilers, stop reading now. Because admittedly, it's giving a little something away to tell you that "Secretary" is the happiest of sexual fairy tales, in which two people with well-matched proclivities live happily ever after, perfectly attuned to each other's illicit longings, in a place where the sheets have been rumpled by real people and not by a stylist. It's an implausible ending, and yet the only possible one. To deny these characters each other's company would be to trample on the hard-won tenderness between them. And that's a kind of aggression that this gentle and surprising movie has no use for.

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