BELOW HER MOUTH

BELOW HER MOUTH

Okay, it's porn. Soft porn but nevertheless porn. I won't even attempt to raise director April Mullin's latest film above what it is. Granted there are no meaningful genitalia shots, but most of the film features scenes with female nudity. More than half of those scenes are naked women getting it on.

Four years ago, director Abdellatif Kechiche released "La vie d'Adèle" (retitled "Blue is the Warmest Color") about two girls who meet fall in love then suffer the slings and arrows of any romance. It was ultimately a coming of age for Adele (played by Adèle Exarchopoulos) with a few tastefully film sex scenes. In reality, the sex scenes in Kechiche's film is more graphic than Mullin's.

Yet Mullin's film feels more like a film you watch on your computer when nobody is around. It's probably because the use of so many cheap lines like "I've never done this before" - Natalie Krill's Jasmine character's utterance to her new found lesbian lover Dallas (Erika Linder). That statement is tantamount to the old "It's so big" comment uttered in the old cheesy porn flicks.

Jasmine is a fashion editor engaged to a soon to be dispatched Rile (Sebastian Pigott) when she espies Dallas working on a roof across the street. Their eye's make contact when she leaves her place and Dallas' male employees hoot and holler it up by making a few cat-calls Jasmine's way.

Dallas has just dispatched her own Asian lover, Joslyn (Mayko Nguyen) and winds up in a local bar at the same time as Jasmine. Dallas moves in for the kill and next thing you know, they are doing all the things you want to see two lovely ladies doing in a porn movie.

The characters are about as well developed as 24-grit sandpaper. Yet Mullen seems to think she has accomplished a feat in female sensuality storytelling. The one thing she does own is her use of a mostly all female production crew - which was probably necessary to make the nude actresses feel more comfortable.

This is the 27-year old Swedish Linder's first film as she comes from a modelling background. It's hard to tell how she was cast other than the fact that she was willing to do the scenes. For Krill, this was actually a step up for her from the catalog of bit parts that make up her filmography. Nguyen is actually in another film releasing today, "Rupture" which as a lot more going or it.

The film does have some merit, the photography is good and the sex scenes are decent. But don't look for much more.

"Below Her Mouth" is moderate porn crudely disguised and perpetrating a celebration of female sexual freedom. There is a possibility that three or four of the ostensibly enlightened viewers will find deep meaning, the rest will see porn. -- GEOFF BURTON

GEOFF BURTON

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