Chastity (1969)

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Cher gives her first dramatic performance in Chastity, produced by then-husband and singing partner Sonny Bono. You could call the film experimental, an American hippie spin on the French New Wave of filmmaking. Or you could call it a largely plotless series of improvised vignettes and montages. Either way, the movie didn’t work for me.

Cher plays Chastity, a young woman we first meet getting picked up by a truck driver. She spends the film hitchhiking and making her way to Mexico and back, swindling people for a few bucks here and there, and constantly trying to persuade people to let her sleep at their house. Not to sleep with them, mind you. Just near them. Turns out Chastity has a secret she’s holding onto, one that doesn’t get revealed until near the end of the film. So if Chastity is about anything, I guess it’s about why the hell Cher is wondering the highways and byways not sleeping with people. By the time I learned why, I’d already checked out of the movie.

The film gets more interesting once Chastity arrives in Mexico and poses as a whore at a cathouse. She grifts a guy for forty bucks before meeting the house’s madame, who ends up taking Chastity as a lover. But things don’t work out, and the episodic screenplay soon whisks Chastity back onto the road and the next potential lover. And don’t get too excited if you think graphic lesbian sex is on the menu. It’s not. Bono instead shows us a series of slow dissolves from wheat blowing in the wind to ocean waves crashing on a sandy beach. Apparently lesbian sex is a lot like a douche commercial.

Bono is clearly trying to make statements about politics, religion, and sexuality with the film, primarily through Cher’s voiceover narration. The pontification lands with a tedious thud, as does the overwrought ending. Chastity might show a glimmer of Cher’s Oscar potential (she’d win for Moonstruck nineteen years later), but it’s otherwise a footnote in pretentious hippie cinema.