scene title: the holy sacrament
performers: kira noir, sovereign syre
site: all her luv (missax)
production credits: serena blair (dir., scr.), isabel dresler (d.p.), missa x (ed.)
release date: march 8, 2019 | trailer
if anyone who reads this has also read through my previous blog, in which i watched and reviewed every girl/girl porn scene released in the month of april 2019 that my budget allowed me to, they might be surprised by some of my criticisms below. wasn't i always moaning about how terrible the writing was? wasn't i always hoping for a little more intellectual heft, wishing that someone who could actually write had been involved in shaping the dialogue rather than relying on models who aren't necessarily skilled improvisers to generate interesting and engaging banter?
yes, i was. and yes, serena blair is, if not absolutely alone in porn, one of a very small number who can actually write on a level that a habitual book reader or theatergoer wouldn't squirm in pained discomfort at. (when, late in 2018, she paraphrased elizabeth bennet's speech to mr. darcy in one of her scenes with kenna james for allherluv without lampshading that that's what she was doing, she made me a fan for life.) the script for this scene is probably the best script in porn, and certainly the best script in girl/girl porn all year, in terms of worldbuilding, character delineation, thematic coherence, meaningful imagery, and erotic intensity. it's because it's so good that i want to criticize it at all: it can bear the scrutiny, where most porn scripts (even the good ones) fall apart the moment you give them a second glance.
so the script is slightly overwritten and a bit precious: sentences that function perfectly well on the page don't quite cohere in voiceover or as dialogue. this isn't a criticism of kira noir's or sovereign syre's delivery: both of them give exceptional performances, and as a one-act play from a relatively novice playwright it's promising: if i'd seen this in a theater with the sex merely implied or simulated, it would be a memorable if perhaps faintly derivative evening. i don't know serena blair's background, but the host of religious allusions and imagery in the script struck me as rather a generic collection of images chosen for their broader cultural symbolism rather than personal resonance; neither the scarlet heat of felt blasphemy nor the icy purity of genuine zealotry came through. my own background was heavily religious, devoutly evangelical in childhood and devoutly roman catholic in youth (don't ask), and the script's leaps from catholic to pagan imagery felt like a kind of category confusion that no one who had internalized either tradition would make.
or maybe the deep conservatism of my catholic experience is showing. i might well be wrong, and this might have been a deeply personal script. but as it played out on screen, it felt more like an attempt to work in the queer literary tradition of engagement with religious iconography (in part because that iconography has been used against queer people for centuries) than a genuine synthesis of religious feeling and queer sexuality. maybe all i'm saying is that i didn't connect to the religious imagery, and i was disappointed by that because of my years in the religious trenches; the queerness of the scene was much more visceral and engaging.
in great part that was due to the script, but in a very real sense it was also due to isabel dresler's cinematography. i've complained before about some porn filmmakers' propensity for substituting dutch angles and vertiginous perspective for any real visual imagination, but in dresler's hands the off-center compositions and shots angled from above or below felt, not like a cheap attempt at visual interest (on par with some reality kings bullshit), but rather a considered and thoroughgoing subjectivity, a genuinely queer stance that rejects the neoclassical pseudo-objectivity of traditional girl/girl porn, which centers the cishetero male gaze even when women are the ones making it (cf. holly randall, kayden kross, even bree mills). as just one example, when sovereign syre finally kneels before kira's spread legs, the camera doesn't peer with horny intrusiveness between those legs, but focuses on sovereign's reactions and actions, because the queer female characters, not the straight male audience, are centered in dresler's subjective lens. kira's genitals come into view when it makes organic sense for them to, rather than being thuddingly revealed in a cinematic strip tease.
i even admired the bold location choice of an upper-story office with enormous windows looking out onto a hazy, bleached los angeles: although i've complained a lot about backlit porn in which sun-white windows overwhelm the color and detail of the scene, it felt appropriate here as turning the room into a sort of half-mystical space in which only these two people matter; the deep focus of dresler's camera on the performers would have been diminished by seeing the sky and cityscape in all its mundanity and solidity behind them throughout, as a more pseudo-objective cinematographer might have attempted.
kira noir was the perfect goddess for sovereign syre's rather spacy divorcée to obsess over: occasionally when scrolling through twitter i've paused on particularly sun-drenched shots of kira and thought that someone should cast her as nefertiti. her controlled, quietly authoritative, and even dispassionate literature professor (and not an adjunct? at twenty-four? in this economy? that was certainly the most unrealistic element of the entire fantasy) was some of the best acting i've seen from kira, who regularly puts in solid pre-sex performances. but sovereign. it took me a little while to get on her wavelength, thanks partly to the density of serena's script, but once i recognized the type of nontraditional student she was playing, i could only admire her nuanced, remarkably vanity-free performance, an overconfident front masking underlying insecurity and need, and shifting subtly in response to kira's equally subtle shifts in receptiveness.
the sexual performance was terrific: both kira and sovereign are exceptional performers in girl/girl porn, and they threw a great deal of passion and intensity into a tryst which rarely felt porny despite some of the more acrobatic positions.
by the way, i keep referring to the genre as girl/girl instead of lesbian because i am old and so for me lesbian implies a sexual exclusivity that almost no porn performers actually embrace; but i certainly don't mean that kira's and sovereign's queer sexuality isn't genuine or genuinely on display here. this is a rare girl/girl scene that deserves to be called a lesbian scene: the unabashed queerness of the script, the camerawork, and the performances, while not actively excluding the straight cis men who no doubt make up the largest share of allherluv's paying audience, doesn't cater to them either. which is what many girl/girl consumers, myself included, actually want; and hopefully enough do that it's financially viable for allherluv to continue producing more work in this vein.
my favorite girl/girl scene of april 2019 was whitney wright's directorial debut for allherluv; that my favorite girl/girl scene of may 2019 is serena blair's directorial debut for the same site might be merely a confirmation of bias. but i think it's genuinely the case that missa x's longtime focus on psychologically fulfilling and narratively engaging stories, willingness to experiment with format and tone, and enlistment of ambitious performers eager to produce the content they want to see has been a force for real positive change in the industry (and specifically in the girl/girl corner of it which is my specialty) in 2019. i don't think that missa x is alone in this: there are a bunch of different porn sites and even multinational corporations giving a platform to interesting ideas and thoughtful performers, and non-performing producers who are stepping up their game concurrently.
there's an increasing sense among the makers of porn that an audience is out there which is hungry for porn with the literary and visual sophistication of mainstream media. i have no idea if the numbers support that, and i'm not sure anyone does: the industry contraction of the early 2010s has left a lot of bitten people feeling twice shy about attempting anything that doesn't have a proven track record and built-in audience. marginally sustainable mediocrity feels less scary when your budgets are squeezed than ambitious leaps into an unknown future. that's why i'm putting my money where my mouth is and subscribing to the maximum number of sites my budget will allow that support thoughtful, independent, and ambitious porn filmmaking. i am that audience hungry for literary and visual sophistication in porn, and if i don't support it i'm unlikely to get it.
but that's also why i'm writing this on a personal blog rather than applying to be an xcritic reviewer or whatever. (also, i don't give a fuck about dvds, it's 2019 and streaming is life.) i don't want to be part of the industry, just a consumer of it with the kind of independent judgment that your average slob with a letterboxd account is free to indulge. i'm going to hate stuff that the people who made it think is great, and i'm going to love stuff that someone with less idiosyncratic tastes will despise. despite my nerdy scoring card at the bottom of this post, there's no such thing as an objective analysis of art. and yes, porn is art, in the sense that it is a performance crafted and presented in such a way as to achieve certain effects which exists in a form accessible by an audience. just because it's a utilitarian form of art doesn't mean it's any less art: dance music, love poetry, and civic architecture are also made to be used for specific purposes, and can be judged on aesthetic as well as utilitarian principles.
so despite my quibbles above, i was thrilled and even rather awestruck by serena blair's directorial debut. a glance at her social media makes her formidable intelligence clear, and her verbal acuity is on display in many of her performances, but not everyone with a glib tongue can produce effective writing, and not everyone with a wide-ranging intellect can shape a dramatically compelling narrative. serena's ability to do both, not to mention the instinct for textual synthesis that allowed her to incorporate a very good fan poem into her screenplay, is a testament to how well she's cultivated her literary talents (i wouldn't be surprised if she has some really solid fanfic under her belt), and her choice in collaborators is an even stronger indicator of how sharp her still-developing skills as a director are already. i can't wait to see more pictures from the blair/dresler team (i know more are coming, thanks to social media), and her superlative casting here makes me trust her implicitly going forward.
tl;dr: serena blair makes exactly the kind of porn i want to see: progressive, literary, proudly queer, and with a subterranean sense of humor that doesn't dampen the eroticism of the narrative, only makes it more appealingly human.
performances: 29
cinematography: 23
editing: 18
script: 14
sjw points: 7
total score:
performers: kira noir, sovereign syre
site: all her luv (missax)
production credits: serena blair (dir., scr.), isabel dresler (d.p.), missa x (ed.)
release date: march 8, 2019 | trailer
 |
| l: kira noir, r: sovereign syre |
if anyone who reads this has also read through my previous blog, in which i watched and reviewed every girl/girl porn scene released in the month of april 2019 that my budget allowed me to, they might be surprised by some of my criticisms below. wasn't i always moaning about how terrible the writing was? wasn't i always hoping for a little more intellectual heft, wishing that someone who could actually write had been involved in shaping the dialogue rather than relying on models who aren't necessarily skilled improvisers to generate interesting and engaging banter?
yes, i was. and yes, serena blair is, if not absolutely alone in porn, one of a very small number who can actually write on a level that a habitual book reader or theatergoer wouldn't squirm in pained discomfort at. (when, late in 2018, she paraphrased elizabeth bennet's speech to mr. darcy in one of her scenes with kenna james for allherluv without lampshading that that's what she was doing, she made me a fan for life.) the script for this scene is probably the best script in porn, and certainly the best script in girl/girl porn all year, in terms of worldbuilding, character delineation, thematic coherence, meaningful imagery, and erotic intensity. it's because it's so good that i want to criticize it at all: it can bear the scrutiny, where most porn scripts (even the good ones) fall apart the moment you give them a second glance.
so the script is slightly overwritten and a bit precious: sentences that function perfectly well on the page don't quite cohere in voiceover or as dialogue. this isn't a criticism of kira noir's or sovereign syre's delivery: both of them give exceptional performances, and as a one-act play from a relatively novice playwright it's promising: if i'd seen this in a theater with the sex merely implied or simulated, it would be a memorable if perhaps faintly derivative evening. i don't know serena blair's background, but the host of religious allusions and imagery in the script struck me as rather a generic collection of images chosen for their broader cultural symbolism rather than personal resonance; neither the scarlet heat of felt blasphemy nor the icy purity of genuine zealotry came through. my own background was heavily religious, devoutly evangelical in childhood and devoutly roman catholic in youth (don't ask), and the script's leaps from catholic to pagan imagery felt like a kind of category confusion that no one who had internalized either tradition would make.
or maybe the deep conservatism of my catholic experience is showing. i might well be wrong, and this might have been a deeply personal script. but as it played out on screen, it felt more like an attempt to work in the queer literary tradition of engagement with religious iconography (in part because that iconography has been used against queer people for centuries) than a genuine synthesis of religious feeling and queer sexuality. maybe all i'm saying is that i didn't connect to the religious imagery, and i was disappointed by that because of my years in the religious trenches; the queerness of the scene was much more visceral and engaging.
in great part that was due to the script, but in a very real sense it was also due to isabel dresler's cinematography. i've complained before about some porn filmmakers' propensity for substituting dutch angles and vertiginous perspective for any real visual imagination, but in dresler's hands the off-center compositions and shots angled from above or below felt, not like a cheap attempt at visual interest (on par with some reality kings bullshit), but rather a considered and thoroughgoing subjectivity, a genuinely queer stance that rejects the neoclassical pseudo-objectivity of traditional girl/girl porn, which centers the cishetero male gaze even when women are the ones making it (cf. holly randall, kayden kross, even bree mills). as just one example, when sovereign syre finally kneels before kira's spread legs, the camera doesn't peer with horny intrusiveness between those legs, but focuses on sovereign's reactions and actions, because the queer female characters, not the straight male audience, are centered in dresler's subjective lens. kira's genitals come into view when it makes organic sense for them to, rather than being thuddingly revealed in a cinematic strip tease.
i even admired the bold location choice of an upper-story office with enormous windows looking out onto a hazy, bleached los angeles: although i've complained a lot about backlit porn in which sun-white windows overwhelm the color and detail of the scene, it felt appropriate here as turning the room into a sort of half-mystical space in which only these two people matter; the deep focus of dresler's camera on the performers would have been diminished by seeing the sky and cityscape in all its mundanity and solidity behind them throughout, as a more pseudo-objective cinematographer might have attempted.
kira noir was the perfect goddess for sovereign syre's rather spacy divorcée to obsess over: occasionally when scrolling through twitter i've paused on particularly sun-drenched shots of kira and thought that someone should cast her as nefertiti. her controlled, quietly authoritative, and even dispassionate literature professor (and not an adjunct? at twenty-four? in this economy? that was certainly the most unrealistic element of the entire fantasy) was some of the best acting i've seen from kira, who regularly puts in solid pre-sex performances. but sovereign. it took me a little while to get on her wavelength, thanks partly to the density of serena's script, but once i recognized the type of nontraditional student she was playing, i could only admire her nuanced, remarkably vanity-free performance, an overconfident front masking underlying insecurity and need, and shifting subtly in response to kira's equally subtle shifts in receptiveness.
the sexual performance was terrific: both kira and sovereign are exceptional performers in girl/girl porn, and they threw a great deal of passion and intensity into a tryst which rarely felt porny despite some of the more acrobatic positions.
by the way, i keep referring to the genre as girl/girl instead of lesbian because i am old and so for me lesbian implies a sexual exclusivity that almost no porn performers actually embrace; but i certainly don't mean that kira's and sovereign's queer sexuality isn't genuine or genuinely on display here. this is a rare girl/girl scene that deserves to be called a lesbian scene: the unabashed queerness of the script, the camerawork, and the performances, while not actively excluding the straight cis men who no doubt make up the largest share of allherluv's paying audience, doesn't cater to them either. which is what many girl/girl consumers, myself included, actually want; and hopefully enough do that it's financially viable for allherluv to continue producing more work in this vein.
my favorite girl/girl scene of april 2019 was whitney wright's directorial debut for allherluv; that my favorite girl/girl scene of may 2019 is serena blair's directorial debut for the same site might be merely a confirmation of bias. but i think it's genuinely the case that missa x's longtime focus on psychologically fulfilling and narratively engaging stories, willingness to experiment with format and tone, and enlistment of ambitious performers eager to produce the content they want to see has been a force for real positive change in the industry (and specifically in the girl/girl corner of it which is my specialty) in 2019. i don't think that missa x is alone in this: there are a bunch of different porn sites and even multinational corporations giving a platform to interesting ideas and thoughtful performers, and non-performing producers who are stepping up their game concurrently.
there's an increasing sense among the makers of porn that an audience is out there which is hungry for porn with the literary and visual sophistication of mainstream media. i have no idea if the numbers support that, and i'm not sure anyone does: the industry contraction of the early 2010s has left a lot of bitten people feeling twice shy about attempting anything that doesn't have a proven track record and built-in audience. marginally sustainable mediocrity feels less scary when your budgets are squeezed than ambitious leaps into an unknown future. that's why i'm putting my money where my mouth is and subscribing to the maximum number of sites my budget will allow that support thoughtful, independent, and ambitious porn filmmaking. i am that audience hungry for literary and visual sophistication in porn, and if i don't support it i'm unlikely to get it.
but that's also why i'm writing this on a personal blog rather than applying to be an xcritic reviewer or whatever. (also, i don't give a fuck about dvds, it's 2019 and streaming is life.) i don't want to be part of the industry, just a consumer of it with the kind of independent judgment that your average slob with a letterboxd account is free to indulge. i'm going to hate stuff that the people who made it think is great, and i'm going to love stuff that someone with less idiosyncratic tastes will despise. despite my nerdy scoring card at the bottom of this post, there's no such thing as an objective analysis of art. and yes, porn is art, in the sense that it is a performance crafted and presented in such a way as to achieve certain effects which exists in a form accessible by an audience. just because it's a utilitarian form of art doesn't mean it's any less art: dance music, love poetry, and civic architecture are also made to be used for specific purposes, and can be judged on aesthetic as well as utilitarian principles.
so despite my quibbles above, i was thrilled and even rather awestruck by serena blair's directorial debut. a glance at her social media makes her formidable intelligence clear, and her verbal acuity is on display in many of her performances, but not everyone with a glib tongue can produce effective writing, and not everyone with a wide-ranging intellect can shape a dramatically compelling narrative. serena's ability to do both, not to mention the instinct for textual synthesis that allowed her to incorporate a very good fan poem into her screenplay, is a testament to how well she's cultivated her literary talents (i wouldn't be surprised if she has some really solid fanfic under her belt), and her choice in collaborators is an even stronger indicator of how sharp her still-developing skills as a director are already. i can't wait to see more pictures from the blair/dresler team (i know more are coming, thanks to social media), and her superlative casting here makes me trust her implicitly going forward.
tl;dr: serena blair makes exactly the kind of porn i want to see: progressive, literary, proudly queer, and with a subterranean sense of humor that doesn't dampen the eroticism of the narrative, only makes it more appealingly human.
performances: 29
cinematography: 23
editing: 18
script: 14
sjw points: 7
total score: