In my own small way I have been attempting for many years to treat porn as just another category in the entertainment spectrum, not put on a pedestal as so many fans do, and definitely not treating it with the ridicule that results in the idiotic dead-ends of "they can't act", "so bad it's good" or "only the sex matters" clichéd reactions.
SWEETNESS & LIGHT by B. Skow, which unfortunately omits a script credit entirely, defies my approach, but its exception to my rule is positive -I'm always willing to learn. The problem here is that the feature works fine on its own XXX turf, but would have to be considered a non-starter viewed from the mainstream vantage point. A heavily bowdlerized version titled "Breakup Sex" is shown on pay-cable (currently Showtime On Demand).
That's a shame, and essentially the fault of the anonymous scriptwriter, plus Skow of course. They have conjured up a well-acted movie with terrific sex scenes, but inadvertently magnified the rom-com formulae, gimmicks, twists and pure corn that make that genre perhaps the most problematic of major genres to pull off successfully, at least in the 21st Century (Lubitsch, Leisen, McCarey, Capra, Cukor and many others had no problem pulling it off like clockwork back in the Golden Age of Hollywood).
Alan Stafford and Brooklyn Chase are the central couple, both attractive but neither the least bit likable. Stafford tends to fly off the handle at the least provocation and covers his lover with verbal abuse, the last straw being when he drops a C-bomb on her (and C doesn't stand for Chase).
Given his license to practice XXX, Skow pours on the black comedy and strangeness after the couple break up. Stafford goes to live with his vaguely beatnik older brother Evan Stone (even hammier than usual in a caricatured role) and sister-in-law Alektra Blue (a true delight, allowed to escape gonzo typecasting for this meaty assignment).
Alektra immediately goes on the make with hapless Alan, and it turns out that both she and hubby Stone are perverts most anxious to have an incestuous (sort of) threesome involving Stafford.
Meanwhile, Brooklyn who keeps the duo's lavish home is having lesbian friends Siri and Belle Noir (a highly contrasting pair) over, and that duo deliver a solid Sapphic sex scene.
Quicker than you can say Dermot Mulroney, the film slips into an exaggerated and barely watchable simulacrum of a Major Studio rom-com, but worse. Stone & Alektra fix up Stafford with a date with beautiful young blonde Karla Kush while the lesbo friends stick Brooklyn with Seth Gamble. Sure, the XXX sex scenes result ("and that's all that matters" I can hear ringing in my ears), but the parallel stories are cutely cross-cut with our distant protagonists even finishing each other's sentences in the editing. What was a diverting, quality sex film has become a groanerama.
Structurally Skow ends up painting himself in a corner, as he's used up the 4 requisite lengthy sex vignettes so with 15 minutes of running time left there's no room for the expected XXX hook-up of Alan & Brooklyn when they eventually reconcile. Instead we have a cornball finale of the duo bickering again on cue, and both exhibiting characteristics that make us wonder why we bothered to stick with such creeps for over two hours in the first place.
Skow has been successful on several occasions with his light-hearted depiction of despicable folk, his tongue always firmly inserted in cheek, but in a rom-com this almost Brechtian distancing is not really possible. If nobody likes the characters, and their shenanigans and fate are meaningless fluff, so much so that no one admits to having written the trash, then why bother? Sure we know where the auteur is coming from, right from the sarcastic title SWEETNESS & LIGHT, but I have to chalk this up as a major disappointment from a very uneven filmmaker - obviously not quite ready for the big time (or even the pseudo-step up from porn & schlock to filming insipid Holiday family movies that marks the recent career move of Grade Z filmmaker Fred Olen Ray).
