Pure

David Alan Clark's "Pure" opens with an apt quotation by Nagisa Oshima, but manages to spell the late, great Japanese filmmaker's name wrong, as Nagasi. Thus begins a pretentious take on the same material that led to Oshima's classic "In the Realm of the Senses", the first mainstream film to successfully integrate explicit hardcore sex scenes.

Asa Akira's acting and sexuality highlight the feature video, well-cast with graduates of Clark's ambitious "Asia Noir" series which concentrated on interracial sex. That quest continues here, as we watch in nearly 3 hours of flashbacks the sexual odyssey that took Asa the hooker to a job at The Realm, a fetish whorehouse, and ultimately to the hoosgow for offing her lover Keni Styles.

Keni, one of the only Asian males to make a name for himself in Adult Cinema, is an import from the world of Brit Porn, and it intrigued me to see Gazzman listed among the special "Gratitudes & Acknowledgments" end credits, as he frequently directed Keni for London's Harmony Films banner. John Stagliano's Evil Angel, which produced "Pure", released many Harmony titles in the U.S., particularly the BDSM work of Tanya Hyde.

So Clark's adventure in the world of BDSM and kink has a suitable foundation, but he fails to deliver on the project's promise. Like another pretentious pornographer David Stanley, he brings a sense of avant-garde and self-importance to his XXX projects, but they remain porn, not rising above the genre as predicted. Here we have strong sex scenes with plenty of kink as icing, but the surrounding story and characters fail to rise to the occasion.

Added touch of explicit violence and gore for the tragic climax is unusual in 21st Century porn due to self-censorship, as the mixing of explicit sex with explicit violence in the same package is subject to real censorship. So the special makeup effects are convincing but hardly worth the wait.

Also jarring is a "special appearance" by Jake Malone, a pornographer in the Evil Angel stable. He's a lousy actor, and his lengthy domination scene abusing Asa's chartacter Sada after slipping her some LSD is anti-erotic, just a creepy looking porn guy indulging himself.

But Jessica Bangkok as the owner of the glorified brothel, Styles as her ill-fated husband, and both Lana Violet and Destiny as, respectively, a dom and a sub working for her all give solid performances. The interrogation structure with flashbacks and Warren Beatty's "Reds" type witnesses talking to the camera about Sada is uninteresting and robs the finale of its intended impact (also overuse of props as foreshadowing of Asa's violent act).

"Pure" refers to the soul of Keni's character Kichi, not very convincing in the poorly written coda. A very large group of hangers-on, all getting screen credit, pop up from the Underground milieu in a central Fetish Gallery Opening, representing the world of trendsters/porno people that is currently documented by kink.com and others.