Bijou

Wakefield Poole's breakthrough gay porn masterpiece no doubt made it into the mainstream (and across lines of sexuality) because it 'high art' ring made it amenable to straight sexual tourists seeking out the other side, but wishing the work to be clothed in a veil of 'legitimacy'--but of course, its wall-to-wall classical music and its self-consciously 'artiness' are its strength. Who'd have thought a Hovhaness symphony would form such a deliriously appropriate soundtrack for a gay orgy? Ecstatically rising each time, stopping, starting again, as if the record were being flipped over, to the orangey-yellow glow of skin against a bare backdrop, bodies reclining, fondling, inclining, as if floating in space, the occasional Dan Flavin sculpture or lens-flare light-show the film's bijouterie along with bodies unadorned in unselfconscious communion and display. To call the film an 'erotic art film' instead of 'gay porn' is to draw a distinction between the commercial, vulgar and exploitative and the transmutatory erotic incantation that Poole refuses; at the same time, the film has a kind of educative function, in the way that its protagonist moves from solitary heterosexual fantasy to the mutual communion of queer fluidity, learning to give as well as take, to experience pleasure as a kind of ecstatic, plateaud network rather than a surge of possession and release.

The film's opening act might suggest otherwise; it is, in a sense, a self-conscious reflection on the absurdity of the narrative incident required to 'justify' the structure of the porn film as more than simply a succession of sex scenes, sex acts. Set to the blasting strains of Holst's 'Mars, the Bring of War', this opening winks at the classic porn framing of builder-as-sex-object. As our protagonist walks home from the building site where he works, the combination of pummelling machines and Holstian martial strains providing at atmosphere that suggests, perhaps, the costs of gentrification, the changing face of the city in which sex as labour or performance is placed. En route, the film stages a troubling sacrifice of a woman, struck by a car at an intersection: our protagonist picks up her purse and walks off without emotion, the ticket he finds in her purse giving him access to the mysterious sex-club which provides the film's title. This framing might suggests a renunciation, not only of heterosexuality--our nominally straight hero will be straight no longer by the time he's left the club--but of women per se. Back at the apartment, after our protagonist has fetishistically and blankly gone through the contents of the bag--orally fixating on the lipstick, picking through the belongings with a kind of curious disinterest--his masturbatory shower fantasy of pin-up girls is soundtracked, with deliberate griminess, to the strained strains of Led Zeppelin, blasted through a fuzzy pocket radio which renders the rockist odes to heterosexuality distorted and disgusted; as images of the woman's falling body jump-cut into his reverie, our hero fails to reach climax. Heterosexual possessiveness--the theft of the pleasure seen to be held as a kind of secret to be extracted from the female body (the ticket from the purse)--may lead him onto the club Bijou, where he hopes to have his sexual troubles laid to rest, but it turns out that the club will cause him to abandon such gendered power dynamics, whether those of heterosexual possession or gay misogyny. His first sexual encounter is with a figure of indeterminate gender, lying face-down on the ground--an initiation into his move away from the paradigm of male-and-female body. The next stage is to watch a kind of experimental film-within-a-film, in which the woman who'd earlier died appears, magically revived, at the centre of split-screen screen tests, bodies, costumes, posing and undressing, blurring into a kind of genderfluid mass.

The film-within-a film sets the mood for what follows--a lengthy orgy, 'presided over' by a centurion-type who stalks around with a whip (though the S&M factor is more an allusion than an actual presence). Poole's lack of interest in the money shot, in a kind of sex-as-labour performance, gives the sequence a peculiar and endless rhythm, amplified by his decision to remove diegetic sound and instead overlay things with the non-diegetic, harking back to the days of silent film and the peculiar visual rhythms and intensities thus implied. Performing as much for themselves as for each other, voyeurism becomes part of erotic exchange rather than a logic of extraction: a space of fluid fantasy, bijouterie, un-self-conscious, with nothing to justify or explain away--the other side of the magic mirror, the rabbit-hole, the door to all wonders.