This awards-nominated (kneejerk plaudits to be sure) feature by Erika Lust almost answers a nagging question I've had about her career: it shows plenty of talent but clearly not enough to make it in mainstream cinema (either for Majors or that amorphous "indie" world), and also a lack of commitment to Adult Cinema. Result is neither fish nor fowl, and for me my least favorite type of cinema (however one wants to classify it): the shaggy dog story.

Ostensibly a mystery whose central figure is tall Maddie, played by Lena Anderson (a talented performer I admire but who has failed to attract porn fans' interest), an American girl who went to Barcelona to work as an intern to Erika Lust (!!?!, about as self-serving a plot gimmick as you can get), and three months later has gone missing. Casey Calvert is her big sis traveling to Erika's Barcelona studio in search, and many flashbacks later decides to bed down with the man she thinks is responsible for her sister's disappearance, her creepy roommate (Michael Vegas)! Too bad for the viewer (i.e., yours truly) that that's the ending of this clunker.

It's the ending because Erika Lust's central theme here, as written by "Montiel" from Erika's story, is that square, old-fashioned lifestyles as favored by one's fuddy-duddy (I mean repressed) parents are passe -one must open oneself to true love in the form of fashionable "everything is everything" lovemaking, personified in high-minded porn like this feature. And along the way, Erika presents an incredibly alluring peek at her own porn studio as if it wee the ultimate in ethical (to use a current porn term I don't quite understand), progressive, humanistic lifestyle -true freedom. From a dramatic, storytelling point of view, the whole notion of why Maddie disappeared is left hanging.

For the contemporary porn fan, the XXX scenes are mechanical, shot mainly from softcore angles (the kind that pornographers shoot as coverage so as to facilitate an alternate cut that could be sold as softcore) and in the case of an erotic fantasy by Lena early in the movie featuring Bishop Black and co-star Kali Sudhra, choppily edited and ridiculously brief.

For the movie fan who likes a real film (many dialogue references to Isabelle Adjani in Andrzej Zulawski's classic horror film "Possession" cite it as eroticism in cinema), we're left with a poor script and univolving direction. Erika Lust has extreme widescreen 'scope visuals contrasted with the shot-on-phone aspect ratio of Lena's gushy confessions about her experiences that Casey conveniently finds on a thumb drive presented to her by Vegas. These visuals, including some inventive split-screen effects for the movie's opening, are about the only signs that someone was directing this lumbering, boring exercise. We're left bewildered, while sister Casey (named Paisley, a flower child of the '60s name if ever there was one) is left abandoning her beard (meaning a "front" to make people think they're lavors rather than platonic) of a boyfriend back home for the detestable Mr. Vegas, my second-least-favorite porn actor.