Sunday, February 12, 2017

From Straight A’s to XXX (Sepia Films/Lifetime, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

First up on Lifetime’s prime-time schedule last night was a “world premiere” film with the provocative — to say the least — title From Straight A’s to XXX, telling the pretty sad tale of Miriam Weeks (the attractive and appropriately perky Haley Pullos — whose name is the sort of thing that in the days of classic Hollywood got changed; who, the studio chiefs thought back then, would want to see “The Wizard of Oz, starring Frances Gumm”?), who gets accepted to her “dream” college, Duke University (and it was a bit startling to hear the name of a real university in a Lifetime movie instead of a fictitious one like “Whittendale,” though given that this is the story of a young woman who pays for college by selling her body sexually it would have fit right into the “Whittendale universe”), only just as she gets the news that she’s in, her dad, Dr. Kevin Weeks (Peter Graham-Gaudreau), receives word that he’s being sent to Afghanistan. This means that the family’s income is about to take such a major nose-dive that the Weekses, Kevin and his wife Harcharan (Imali Perera) — I don’t recall hearing her first name on the soundtrack but that’s what imdb.com says it is — can no longer afford to cover her tuition. So what’s a poor young college girl to do? She discusses this with her college roommate Jolie (Sasha Clements) — who is really from Oklahoma but has spent enough time in New Orleans to acquire a (bad) Southern accent and a lassiez-faire attitude towards public displays of casual sex (of course Miriam asks her about Mardi Gras and Jolie fends off the question with a hauteur that indicates she’s bored with the whole ritual and if you’ve seen one Mardi Gras you’ve pretty much seen them all) — and they joke about various options. Miriam doesn’t want to take out student loans — “My dad didn’t finish paying off his student loans until I was in middle school!” she whines — and she doesn’t want a job as a waitress, not only because it’s demeaning but because the low pay for a waitress in North Carolina (where the minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, the same as the federal one) is barely going to make a dent in the $65,000 per year Duke charges for its education. “Maybe we could rob a bank,” Jolie jokes — and Miriam jokes back, “Or I could be a porn star.”

Then Miriam decides to pursue porn seriously, though for a woman who’s supposed to be savvy enough about feminism that she’s double-majoring in pre-law and women’s studies, she makes a pretty dire mistake in signing on for her first scene with a company called “Facial Assault.” Not bothering to read the comments page on the Web search about them — which describes them as totally unprofessional and hell to work for — she shows up for her first scene, and is confronted with a male partner who looks like he just came from the USA Network’s “Raw” wrestling program and likes to refer to feminists as “feminazis” à la Rush Limbaugh. The guy slaps Miriam across the face — hard — as his idea of foreplay and she goes ahead and does the scene, gets the $1,200 she was promised for it and then goes back to Duke to lick her wounds. Eventually she hooks up with an L.A.-based porn agent and director who promises her better pay and nicer working conditions, and her first scene under this new arrangement is a girl-on-girl (Miriam, using the nom de porn “Belle Knox,” says in a pretty typically pretentious remark for someone of her intellect and background that she’d considered herself Bisexual but had never actually done the down-’n’-dirty with a fellow XX-er before) encounter set up with some pretty typically bad porn dialogue in which the two lament that they’re the first to arrive at a party and so “we’ll just have to entertain each other.” She and her on-screen partner Mandy (Jovanna Huguet) are shown doing so many of these scenes one begins to wonder whether Belle is ever going to shoot a scene with a guy — but eventually she does, and she finds her first male co-star genuinely attractive even though, not surprisingly, the film makes doing porn seem considerably more fun than it is for real. (I’ve never interviewed anyone from the straight porn world, but the Gay male porn models I’ve talked to say it’s an hours-long grind; as with any other sort of filmmaking, the actors are kept waiting for long periods while the director, camerapeople and other technicians set up the scene, and male porn performers have the problem of having to get hard-ons instantly on cue.)

Belle shoots to the top of the porn world even though maintaining her double life — neatly dramatized by director Vanessa Parise (a cut above the general run of Lifetime directors; the films of hers I’ve seen are Perfect High, #popFan and The Unauthorized “Beverly Hills, 90210” Story) in a series of intercuts between Miriam’s and Belle’s Facebook pages — gets harder and harder, as she’s shown frantically plowing her way through a thick and impenetrable women’s studies text during breaks on her porn shoots. As Belle’s reputation grows, so does her repertoire of scenes, including ones with Black partners and a sequence she draws back from in which she’s supposed to be playing a college student showing up to “discuss my thesis” with a 50-something professor. Belle draws back from this one — I had thought writer Anne-Marie Hess was going to go for the irony that a college girl who takes her studies seriously is playing one who’s willing to trade sex for good grades, but it turns out her problem is that she had made it clear that she didn’t want to perform with any partner older than 35. Her mentor, who’s also directing, says that unless she does the scene she’ll gain a reputation for being “difficult” and that will get in the way of her doing future work, so she plows on regardless. Meanwhile, an Asian-American student named Jeff (he’s not identified on imdb.com but, though he’s not all that great-looking, there’s a scene in which he’s wearing a shirt tight enough to show a nice pair of pecs) discovers Belle’s videos online and recognizes her as Miriam, and soon it’s all over Duke that one of their nice young freshgirls is doing porn. Miriam hoped that her two worlds would never cross, but now they have; she confides in Jolie, and soon she’s being harassed, threatened with gang-rape, literally assaulted with garbage and her dorm-room door is spray-painted “Slut.” At one point I thought this would have been an interesting project for her to write up as a paper for her women’s-studies class — they had earlier been shown discussing terms like “slut,” “whore” and “bitch” and how they’re used to objectify women, and Miriam is now getting a first-hand education in how this works for real — but instead Jolie talks her into doing an interview with Angela, a reporter for the Duke school paper, and eventually she goes full-public with an interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan (playing himself) and her story becomes nationwide tabloid fodder. Of course Miriam’s family — her highly conservative Catholic parents and her brother, who cuts her dead when he finds out — learn about her unusual way of working herself through college, and they’re predictably condemnatory.

Though the credits say this film was “inspired by a true story,” it also travels down the same roads seemingly hundreds of previous Lifetime movies have gone before, though I give writer Hess credit for not having Miriam get hooked on drugs to sustain herself through her porn work — a plot twist usually de rigueur for these sorts of titillating stories about nice young girls who get involved in sex work and then lose control. (Maybe Hess and director Parisse figured they’d already done the innocent-girl-seduced-into-the-drug-scene number in Perfect High and didn’t need to do it again.) The film climaxes (so to speak) at the Risqué porn convention in Las Vegas, where Belle Knox receives the Best New Performer award but also finds that Mandy and the other porn women whom she thought were her friends instead have decided she’s getting too high-and-mighty for them and especially hate how in her mainstream media appearances she presumed to speak for all women who do porn. As familiar as most of this story is, that’s a new wrinkle Parisse and Hess got into this one: we never feel for Miriam so much as we do when it seems like she’s lost all sources of her community and been rejected by her family, her college friends and her porn friends. The story lurches to a close as Miriam closes out her freshman year and then, two years later, speaks at a rally of pro-sex feminists and says that feminism ought to be about a woman’s right to make choices about her own life — including selling her body on screen for money, if that’s what she wants and feels she has to do. It’s an O.K. ending but an oddly inconclusive one for a film that, as familiar as the paths it trods are, does have some unique aspects and also makes me wish Vanessa Parise would be able to break out of the Lifetime ghetto, get some decent scripts and take a run at feature films.