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Porn as moist sacrament, recounted at a diner in exchange for a cup of coffee. Dingy strip-joint scrabblers, Artie and Jim Mitchell are also stark students of Rivette, their willowy muse (Marilyn Chambers) is glimpsed early on contemplating her loneliness, plain and bundled-up in a wintry patio. Suddenly scooped up and sent down the rabbit hole, she's the night's main attraction at a subterranean sex club with masked guests. "Ladies and gentlemen, you are about to witness the ravishment of a woman who has been abducted... A woman whose fear has mellowed into expectation." A slender and glazed mannequin, Chambers is the tantalizing tabula rasa thawed by a gaggle of fondling, licking, black-robed priestesses, a sliver of pale flesh vibrating on the darkened stage. Enter Johnny Keyes—terse, painted, engorged—for the next level, an incantation/exploitation of the African-stud that envisions simultaneous orgasms as a jazz crescendo. Finally, the trapeze act of the kinky circus, with the heroine busying herself with a quartet of acrobats while the inflamed audience breaks into writhing daisy-chains. The Cezanne orgy segues into the Pollock splooge, a slow-mo set-piece overlapped, solarized, psychedelicized. The tale told, there's nothing left for the trucker but to drive back into the night, his fantasies projected onto a windshield (cf. Akerman's Je Tu Il Elle). A high-toned San Francisco trance to Deep Throat's lowbrow Times Square yodel, a dream state so evocative it was up to Kubrick to give it a name nearly three decades later: "Fidelio."
--- Fernando F. Croce |