A riveting psychosexual thriller, "Unreal" gives porn star Chloe the opportunity to show both her erotic and acting skills, courtesy of writer-director Anthony Lovett (a/k/a Antonio Passolini). It's an award-winner from over two decades ago, little remembered today.
She's an office worker, busy answering the phone at a desk adjacent to Tina Tyler, working for boss Steven St. Croix who's running a real estate agency. The entire movie is told from Choe's point-of-view, with her voiceover narration proving to be highly unreliable - novelistic device used skilfully by filmmaker Lovett.
Chloe's attitude, always maintaining a sang froid/deadpan facial expression that contrasts quite effectively with the surreal sex scenes depicted, draws the viewer into this extended fantasy. What is real? Can we believe what we see through her eyes or what she tells us about her life? That isn't answered until a powerful finale,
As in another big-deal VCA production Passolini made around this time, "Club Sin", a terrific cast appears to perform Chloe's erotic fantasies, none of them upstaging the talented star, and the integration of the story with the XXX sex is a further demonstration of how Adult Cinema, both in the 1970s and at the turn of this century, achieved the goal of making real story/character driven movies (with XXX included), a concept that has been almost entirely abandoned now.
She's an office worker, busy answering the phone at a desk adjacent to Tina Tyler, working for boss Steven St. Croix who's running a real estate agency. The entire movie is told from Choe's point-of-view, with her voiceover narration proving to be highly unreliable - novelistic device used skilfully by filmmaker Lovett.
Chloe's attitude, always maintaining a sang froid/deadpan facial expression that contrasts quite effectively with the surreal sex scenes depicted, draws the viewer into this extended fantasy. What is real? Can we believe what we see through her eyes or what she tells us about her life? That isn't answered until a powerful finale,
As in another big-deal VCA production Passolini made around this time, "Club Sin", a terrific cast appears to perform Chloe's erotic fantasies, none of them upstaging the talented star, and the integration of the story with the XXX sex is a further demonstration of how Adult Cinema, both in the 1970s and at the turn of this century, achieved the goal of making real story/character driven movies (with XXX included), a concept that has been almost entirely abandoned now.