Lesbian and straight porn director Nica Noelle has more recently made several dozen Gay videos, and MY MOTHER'S LOVER is the best I've seen so far. Extremely well-scripted and with better acting than usual (for a genre where the actors are still called "models" and have better things to do than chew the scenery or employ "The Method") it's a winner worthy of crossover audiences.
Part of NN's strategy is to integrate real acting talent into the cast, and these "ringers" all do yeoman work in making the clearly sex-genre movie play like a real film. Principal among these is Ian Whitcomb, the '60s British pop singer who in his elder years appears from time to time in a hardcore Noelle opus to great effect.
He's the headmaster of Bristol, a top British boarding school for boys in this tale set in the 1930s in England (but shot in Califrornia, including an atmospheric Pasadena Victorian era house). Our protagonist Robert (Chase Austin) is caught by Whitcomb after having sex in a storage room with fellow student Travis Irons, and the headmaster calmly reads him the riot act regarding such misbehavior, normally met with expulsion. He shows him a vintage photo of Robert's late dad, who was a student of his long ago, and sentimentally lets him off relatively easy, administering a vivid (and well- edited) punishment of flogging, followed by a four-week suspension, during which Robert goes home to mama.
(Whitcomb also provided the feature's evocative musical score as writer and performer, played on 78rpm recordings on a vintage Pathe machine.)
Mum is played with great empathy by NN's favorite actress Magdalene St. Michaels, living with her fiancé Daniel (Boston Miller) who Robert meets for the first time. They connect, and after Robert recalls in flashback peeping on a prof (Brendon Cage, a burly Oliver Reed type) making love to another student (Tyler Sweet) in the shower at school, he has a torrid sex scene with step-dad-to-be Daniel while mom's away caring for her ill sister. The two generations of males connected at first sight.
Meanwhile there is the issue of Robert's ne-'er-do-well brother Jeremy (guest star Xander Corvus) who's holed up in his room painting, not even exiting to come down to supper with the family. He's tormented by their father's death by gunshot, which he attributes to suicide. With shaved head and very effectively applied (by makeup) mustache and beard, Corvus gives a moving performance taking the gay porn movie briefly into Eugene O'Neill territory. (Speaking of crossovers, both he and Maggie would do well in straight theatrical assignments of a serious O'Neill nature if given half the chance to escape their porn typecasting in these unenlightened times.)
SUPER DUPER SPOILERS AHEAD:
Nica ties her coming of age in a repressive environment plot threads together elegantly in a final vignette which at first seems like just another "for variety" sex scene necessary to the video feature format, but which is brilliantly conceived and delivered.
Jeremy commits suicide by drinking turpentine which we've seen several times before in a bottle innocently sitting near his easel.
We see Travis Irons again, who seems to have been just a minor character in his opening, no-dialog sex scene in the storage room with Robert at school, now having sex with Tyler Sweet, the shower boy. Once more, they are caught after their money shots by Whitcomb and hauled off to be reprimanded. Once more Travis is sitting out in the hallway (I recall many a day myself on such a bench back in elementary school when I was sent away from one class or another to cool my heels after some minor infraction or disturbance) as we hear through the door Sweet being flogged, and the film ends quite ominously on Whitcomb subsequently closing the door after putting his arm around Travis's shoulder, implying he's his "luring" confederate, not some random errant schoolboy. A reprised shot of that photo of a young Whitcomb with Robert's dad as schoolboy chillingly implicates suicidal daddy as Travis's predecessor in scheming perversity.
The material is worthy of a great mainstream director, most notably Lindsay Anderson (re: his classic "if..."), who was the toughest interview subject I ever encountered back in my journalist days, meeting him on his press tour for THE WHALES OF AUGUST 28 years ago. It's exactly the sort of sometimes over-the- top melodrama regarding repressed feelings and forbidden acts that propelled the best of Nica's girl/girl , boy/girl and even boy/trans-female features before she switched over to boy/boy cinema a couple years back. Hopefully, despite commercial pressures to the contrary (gonzo remains King in virtually all these genres) her current prolific contribution to Gay Cinema will prove as rewarding as this landmark work.
Part of NN's strategy is to integrate real acting talent into the cast, and these "ringers" all do yeoman work in making the clearly sex-genre movie play like a real film. Principal among these is Ian Whitcomb, the '60s British pop singer who in his elder years appears from time to time in a hardcore Noelle opus to great effect.
He's the headmaster of Bristol, a top British boarding school for boys in this tale set in the 1930s in England (but shot in Califrornia, including an atmospheric Pasadena Victorian era house). Our protagonist Robert (Chase Austin) is caught by Whitcomb after having sex in a storage room with fellow student Travis Irons, and the headmaster calmly reads him the riot act regarding such misbehavior, normally met with expulsion. He shows him a vintage photo of Robert's late dad, who was a student of his long ago, and sentimentally lets him off relatively easy, administering a vivid (and well- edited) punishment of flogging, followed by a four-week suspension, during which Robert goes home to mama.
(Whitcomb also provided the feature's evocative musical score as writer and performer, played on 78rpm recordings on a vintage Pathe machine.)
Mum is played with great empathy by NN's favorite actress Magdalene St. Michaels, living with her fiancé Daniel (Boston Miller) who Robert meets for the first time. They connect, and after Robert recalls in flashback peeping on a prof (Brendon Cage, a burly Oliver Reed type) making love to another student (Tyler Sweet) in the shower at school, he has a torrid sex scene with step-dad-to-be Daniel while mom's away caring for her ill sister. The two generations of males connected at first sight.
Meanwhile there is the issue of Robert's ne-'er-do-well brother Jeremy (guest star Xander Corvus) who's holed up in his room painting, not even exiting to come down to supper with the family. He's tormented by their father's death by gunshot, which he attributes to suicide. With shaved head and very effectively applied (by makeup) mustache and beard, Corvus gives a moving performance taking the gay porn movie briefly into Eugene O'Neill territory. (Speaking of crossovers, both he and Maggie would do well in straight theatrical assignments of a serious O'Neill nature if given half the chance to escape their porn typecasting in these unenlightened times.)
SUPER DUPER SPOILERS AHEAD:
Nica ties her coming of age in a repressive environment plot threads together elegantly in a final vignette which at first seems like just another "for variety" sex scene necessary to the video feature format, but which is brilliantly conceived and delivered.
Jeremy commits suicide by drinking turpentine which we've seen several times before in a bottle innocently sitting near his easel.
We see Travis Irons again, who seems to have been just a minor character in his opening, no-dialog sex scene in the storage room with Robert at school, now having sex with Tyler Sweet, the shower boy. Once more, they are caught after their money shots by Whitcomb and hauled off to be reprimanded. Once more Travis is sitting out in the hallway (I recall many a day myself on such a bench back in elementary school when I was sent away from one class or another to cool my heels after some minor infraction or disturbance) as we hear through the door Sweet being flogged, and the film ends quite ominously on Whitcomb subsequently closing the door after putting his arm around Travis's shoulder, implying he's his "luring" confederate, not some random errant schoolboy. A reprised shot of that photo of a young Whitcomb with Robert's dad as schoolboy chillingly implicates suicidal daddy as Travis's predecessor in scheming perversity.
The material is worthy of a great mainstream director, most notably Lindsay Anderson (re: his classic "if..."), who was the toughest interview subject I ever encountered back in my journalist days, meeting him on his press tour for THE WHALES OF AUGUST 28 years ago. It's exactly the sort of sometimes over-the- top melodrama regarding repressed feelings and forbidden acts that propelled the best of Nica's girl/girl , boy/girl and even boy/trans-female features before she switched over to boy/boy cinema a couple years back. Hopefully, despite commercial pressures to the contrary (gonzo remains King in virtually all these genres) her current prolific contribution to Gay Cinema will prove as rewarding as this landmark work.