Appassionata

Asia Carrera excels as actress, sex performer, writer, and is also responsible for the musical score of this classic Romantic Adult movie. She also co-directed with her husband Bud Lee and proves that sincere, meaningful Adult Cinema did not die with the theatrical film releases of the 1970s and early 1980s.

Her semi-autobiographical story covers basic themes of hope, disillusionment and creative striving which work remarkably well in a porn format. Often Adult movies harp on the difference between mainstream moviemaking and the Adult industry, but Asia's story, of a runaway girl who heads to L.A. in hopes of a career as a classical pianist, convincingly covers the hard knocks and cynicism confronting an aspiring artist without any of the porn cliches.

Both Asia and her male lead Alex Sanders give highly sympathetic performances, creating characters one can root for and identify with. Those few story-line porn features in recent years, even the big-deal Brad Armstrong productions, generally fail in that department, making niceties like dialog, motivation and story completely subservient to the elongated sex scenes.

Clapper-boards in the BTS short subject on Disk Two of this movie's subsequent DVD release display the shooting title as "Piano", and Asia's piano playing for her character as well as on the underscore is quite impressive. Alex plays an aspiring artist, who picks up Asia hitchhiking for a Road Movie format, traveling around in hopes of landing a break, but coming up against industry gatekeepers who in Asia's case demand sex as a quid pro quo for any advancement. She stays true to her ideals, a theme one would think contradictory to a porn film but her script manages to pull off this thematic tightrope act. The finished film proves that she and husband Bud can be true to their craft and fashion a strong, extremely well-made movie without falling prey to the "sex is all that counts" conventional wisdom that dominates 21st Century Adult Cinema.

Providing the springboard for a happy, fairy tale ending to a tale that is basically downbeat (as all stories of disillusionment, my favorite movie theme dating back to Italian classics like "The Easy Life" and Pasolini-scripted "From A Roman Balcony" over 50 years ago, must be), Asia presents a parallel story set in the 18th Century. She plays a princess in love with Mozart (Mark Davis), her royal parents played by the all-time great Veronica Hart and her real-life husband (in a very fine NonSex acting performance) Cyril Yano. The costuming, wigs and dialog are terrific in this subsidiary story, which adds depth and breadth to the overall film (shot on 35mm, no less).

Chief adversary for the duo is Harold Davenport, a Hefner-type hedonist masterfully played by Mike Horner, who seemingly offers the prospect of being a patron of the arts, but turns out toe be just another exploiter. Director Lee recalls the Golden Age of '70s porn by staging two elaborate orgy scenes that are quite effective, one set in the 18th Century as a sort of bachelor party thrown by the Emperor, and the other a non-stop group-sex by the pool at Davenport's mansion. Counting Carrera, the cast includes a full dozen beautiful and big-name actresses, something for the fans in a movie that easily could have been 100% Carrera-centric in its sex content. Standing out from the pack are Holly Body and Johnni Black in an outdoor threesome at a campsite with Alex.

In reviewing Adult Cinema circa the turn of this century I have discovered how adventurous filmmakers and studios were, lavishing big budgets on 35mm productions of merit even before the DVD replaced VHS as the mode of delivery. Unfortunately, with the current internet-driven streaming era it seems highly unlikely that serious personal projects with adequate budgets, as opposed to all-sex content, like "Appassionata" are ever to be greenlighted again.