Prior to viewing this rare art-house film, I admittedly had expected it to be a drug-hazed Cockettes vanity project. I was entirely mistaken. Steven Arnold, a legendary and rather mysterious figure on the underground cinema preiphery, has created a magical, mystical work of erotic art which is both ingenious in concept, and dazzlingly on fleek in composition. Feistily defiant of its prescriptive "queer cinema" designation, LUMINOUS PROCURESS demands the attention of a broader and more diversified viewership. With the passing of years, it has alchemized as a fascinating historical document of the bright but brief period in America when personal liberty and mutuality were a widespead reality. To call it "a film of its time" would be hugely understated...it's as if the purest essence of the sexual revolution has been fossilized in camera. The participants are clearly having the time of their lives, blissfully unaware of the merciless contagion which loomed on the horizon. Twenty years ahead, too few of these pioneers would be among the living, and their brave ideas and attitudes would be hushed by backlash during the AIDS crisis. The Reagan years would see the return of conservative mores, and fear would lead the dance within the sexual arena.
It's always difficult to explain what loose-narrative films are *about*...though there is a skeletal expository framework at hand, it's provided chiefly to segue and bookend a collection of sexually charged vignettes. Two young men approach the threshold of a sprawling estate, and are greeted at the door by a creature of striking epicene beauty who guides them on a bizarre tour. It soon becomes clear that this is an otherworldly place where the sexually adventurous have merged to exact their most elaborate fantasies. Said youths are apparently uninitiated, but wander with voyeuristic curiosity various rooms, halls, and gardens, their excitement mounting as they observe the erotic excursions, Dionysiac dalliances, and sybaritic psychodramas therein. The exhibitionists at hand are men, women, and cross genders, all visually arresting in mostly unique and unconventional ways...and in true Cockettes fashion, they are frequently clad in ostentatious, pavonine raiments with wildly-styled hair. The film will end before the young men have completed their tour...because their tour will not end. They have coalesced with the flesh-and-blood landscape in this boundless Arcadia of unsuppressed pleasure...and they're eagerly awaiting the arrival of the next visitants.
The film's stylistic flourishes frequently tip the hat to Fellini(an obvious homage rather than a contrivance), and subtle images evoking "Old Hollywood" nostalgia twinkle with warm regard to the Kenneth Anger oeuvre. These are loose comparisons, however...LUMINOUS PROCURESS is a sui-generis work, quite unlike any of the pornographic, sexploitation, and "head" pictures of its day. Oneiric surrealism abounds, generally steeped in spoony, playful irreverence, and while the film does cross a few edgier and reservedly explicit junctures, it wisely evades heavy-handed pretense and drooling malapert transgressions. The psychedelic spaciness of the proceedings is intensified by a disorienting synthesized "musique concrete", often sounding like a cosmic antique carousel groaning and churning in rusted disrepair at the bottom of the sea.
Steven Arnold muses on the multisensory nature of eroticism...tactile, cerebral, emotional, and...perhaps...supernatural, his images give flesh to the full pneuma of human sexuality. Though it's roundly a metaphysical testament to psychoactive lotus-eating and the Bacchanalian appetite, moments imbued with loving sentiment have not been wholly foregone.
If you flatly define sex as missionary position coitus in the dark on a mattress between husband and wife, then you might benefit from this film's single, simple, cautionary message ---- LIGHTEN UP. Sex is vital, healthy, and fun. Thank you, Steven Arnold, for leaving us with seventy-three wildly transcendent minutes.
9/10.
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