There’s a much-quoted sentence by Karl Marx that goes something like this: “Hegel remarks somewhere that history tends to repeat itself. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."
In 2004, there were a couple of instances of teenagers trying to sell their virginity on the internet auction site ebay. In January that year an 18 year-old girl from London started the ball rolling and by March had apparently gone through with it, with a 44 year old businessman , then in June that year a 19-year-old male student from Bournemouth University did the rounds of the media trying to do the same although I couldn’t find any articles confirming whether he did find a woman under 50 to sleep with or did give £1000 of his profit to charity.  Three years later, a dramatised film purporting to partially be a documentary has taken this idea and put it on the big screen.
Buy it now is actually two short films back to back with the same cast and sets. I didn’t realise this was the case until half way through the film and it is to the credit of the documentary style recreation of the supposed events that the audience is beguiled into the possible truth of the unfolding events. The mockumentary (for want of a better word) that depicts American teen Chelsea’s process of selling her virginity online is engaging and awkward, self-consciously framed by the character supposedly filming herself on video within the confines of her bedroom and eventually through the half closed door of the wardrobe in the hotel room where the act takes place. I supposed I should have been tipped off by the onscreen text at the opening of the film that claims the following footage was given to the filmmakers to edit. This is the type of legend rendered redundant from thirty years of teen horror from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to The Blair Witch Project and back again.
This is a different kind of horror and while there were a couple of people displaying schadenfreude with their laughter in the audience, the disclaimers on screen – “this scene has been edited for legal reasons” – and voyeuristic framing of Chelsea’s humiliation at the hands of her winning bidder are successfully unsettling. All this is then undermined by a cheesy TV movie of the week style recreation of the events in the second half, which gives all the characters additional dialogue and more banal cinematic framing. Ironically, this second half was made first by director Antonio Campos as a student film which having won awards and plaudits prompted the addition and creation of the remake to bring the film up to ‘feature length’. If there was some kind of search for ‘truth’ in the material by doing the remake in documentary style, then the film is obviously missing a third part where perhaps the director could make a genuine documentary looking at the cases and media interest in the actual teens that prompted this movie.
Following the likes of Hal Hartley’s Flirt and Lars Von Trier’s The Five Obstructions, there is a certain amount of mileage to be had in reworking and remaking the same material, not to mention Todd Solondz’ Palindromes where half a dozen actors play the same character in different situations. Having improved his film by remaking it once, it’s a shame that Campos didn’t pick up the baton a third time.
As it is, Campos illustrates two elements of Marx’ quote, his film replays a modern phenomenon that in its first two incarnations were tragic and farcical and his two recreations (now out of chronological order) unwittingly follow the same pattern. As I couldn’t find evidence of Hegel committing those actual words to paper himself, Marx like Campos was engaging in a game of intellectual Chinese whispers, however while this movie is an interesting curio that shows possibly the start of a director’s increasing talent, I doubt it will have quite so long lasting a resonance.