Analyzing the documentary A Labor of Love is a tricky business.
Brief but focused and interesting, it’s a movie about movies, tracking
production of a low-budget indie called The
Last Affair that was made in Chicago, and the documentarians capture
elements of artistic obstacles, cast misbehavior, financial pressure, sudden
production problems, and the tedium of creating films one camera angle at a
time. None of that, however, suggests the film’s main hook and the reason why
it’s so complicated to discuss. Prior to principal photography on The Last Affair, backers told director
Henri Charr to include hardcore sex scenes or else kiss his budget goodbye—so
by the time documentarians Robert Flaxman and Daniel Goldman began filming life
on the set of The Last Affair, they
had become journalists tracking the creation of pornography.
This turn of
events created two problems, both intermingled with aesthetic and social
considerations. Firstly, because A Labor
of Love concerns a “real” movie that morphed into porn, A Labor of Love isn’t truly a
documentary about the “porn chic” movement that thrived during the early ’70s.
There’s a big difference between this film’s squirm-inducing scenes of
uninhibited men and women screwing on camera and, say, fly-on-the-wall coverage
of professional adult-film stars grinding away on a soundstage in Southern
California. A Labor of Love
illustrates the surreal working conditions of porn sets without saying anything
about the porn industry. Secondly, the documentarians cross enough lines of
decorum and good taste to become pornographers themselves. During its
theatrical release, A Labor of Love
carried an X-rating because it features countless closeups of female genitalia,
as well as male-gaze favorites including female masturbation and attractive
women receiving oral sex. Yet there’s barely more than a fleeting glimpse of
male frontal nudity, suggesting the documentarians felt the true value of their
work wasn’t satisfying intellectual curiosity, but rather inspiring hard-ons.
The most frustrating thing about A Labor
of Love is that it’s made well. The on-set footage is steady and vivid,
no easy feat given all the chaos and varying lighting patterns of an active film
set, and the sit-down interviews are revelatory, with Charr discussing his
anguish about the porn requirements and actresses sharing regret after filming
exploitive scenes. Parsing the respectable documentary buried inside the skin
show, the best moments involve a hopped-up stud failing to rouse—necessitating
the use of a stand-in—and the use of liquid soap to create a skeevy cinematic
illusion. Although A Labor of Love
lacks all sorts of important context, including postmortem interviews exploring
what happened with The Last Affair,
it conveys some truth, as when a crew member remarks that filming coitus is
like making an industrial film, all numbing repetition. Heavy
on the labor, light on the love.
A Labor of Love: FUNKY
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