Breadcrumbs

Memo to Bree Mills: Don't quit your day job.

Her decade-long career as pornographer has been successful - plenty of dough earned and attention gotten, but the amount of quality work among her thousands of productions is quite low, nearly infinitesimal.

"Breadcrumbs" is one of her occasional larger-scale projects to demonstrate more than just gonzo porn. It deals with the failing marriage of Lexi Luna and Seth Gamble, and asks the unscintillating question: can it be saved? Both of them stray and both are constantly morose and depressed, a state I approached sitting through it.

Bree's dialogue is poor, not the way people actually talk. Nadir is when gal pal Siri gives leading lady Lexi Luna advice: "Maybe you could suggest poly-play to your husband?". I googled that word and found a 1985 East German (!) arcade videogame, not the intended reference to polyamory -a porn staple.

Situations presented are uninteresting, and the very, very serious atmosphere throughout is a turn-off. Sex scenes are no different from her less pretentious horde of both girl/girl and boy/girl vignettes, not to mention Bree's tons of trans content.

Casting Seth was a dumb move, as his acting is poor and his overexposure recently a deadly drawback. Watching him go through the motions is a drag. Luna tries to be very sympathetic in a "pity me" fashion and would be better off cast as a beauty on a pedestal -it's hard to identify with her in this wimpy role. Supporting cast is wasted (especially Emma Hix in a role emulating Nina Hartley's niche as the Dr. Ruth of porn) and popular starlet Melissa Stratton looks way too much like Lexi to be a reasonable choice as "the other woman".

Phenomenon of "breadcrumbing", or manipulating someone by giving just snippets of information to mislead about one's true intentions is hardly anything new, so putting a hip name to it doesn't make the material seem fresh. Worse yet, the finale of the story contradicts the title: Emma Hix who our couple finds via her on-line description is presented as the real deal, not somebody fooling them with "breadcrumbs".

Without the XXX content, this could be a soap opera from many decades ago.