Andrej Lupin (for Sex Art) – Apple Pie featuring Silvie Deluxe and Whitney Conroy (2014)

I stumbled across this video as a result of a production still that crossed my dash today.

In theory, sapphic desire is among my principle interests. In practice, meh. My eyes have never bled out from the repetition of rushed, clumsy oral by gay-for-pay porn vixens.

And although in the aforementioned still there is definitely an awkward lack of familiarity–which can read as discomfort–in the positioning of either women’s hands. However, the still does convey an unusually clear since of space; and that was enough to motivate me to take a closer look.

I am glad I did. Yes, there’s some of the rushed, less than passionate oral sex that so frustrates me. (Along with rote indicators that this video was made by a man for consumption by other men–absence of pubic hair, deploying fingers less as strategically penetrative stroking implements and more as ersatz erections.)

Normally, those things would be a major turn off. They aren’t here though. And I think that’s partly due to the fact that although the lighting looks like a cross between the overly dramatic look of a daytime soap and Breaking Bad, at least some thought/effort/time went into thinking about light before shooting began.

The kicker is not so much that the women do a better than average job selling the throes of their pleasure, it’s that the extreme closeups of each woman’s genitals are used sparingly. Instead, closeups are used to focus on touch, gesture or expression. Further, in most of the wide shots both women are framed so that their entire bodies are contained within the boundaries of the frame. (No amputations/decapitations, hurrah!)

But this scene above is not only the one I orgasmed to while watching, it represents something I’ve never seen before– a director setting up a scene where everything is played toward the camera but instead of going for the closeup, we are forced to take a step back and watch from a distance. It’s a move that not only very much appeals to my own personal aesthetic but also feels unusually reverent.

Lastly, no matter how contrived I am all about the fact that the two flirt before things get hot and heavy and then the easy cut away after they’ve both supposedly gotten off is ditched to offer a sort of unwieldy afterglowing intimacy.