Lefty

With "Lefty" and the recent "The Devil Is in the Details", Dana Vespoli emerges as the most exciting director/performer in Adult Cinema. Based on this crisp, concise feature I'm looking forward to the next decade of her work.

In the title role of a former bantamweight champ of Filipino descent who's coming out of retirement for one last hurrah, Dana is terrific, both physically forceful and dramatically emotional without giving in to the sentimentality that usually mars the boxing genre. Made for Sweetheart Video, the content is of course about the ups & downs of lesbian romances, but tastefully presented, especially in contrast to the often gonzo approach Dana takes in her many Evil Angel releases.

With the terrific Bree Daniels in support, playing a magazine reporter (her editor is a cameo by the Hall of Famer Veronica Hart) out to get the story on Dana's checkered life history, the movie carefully avoids the major cliché of the genre that was solidified by Stallone's hit "Rocky" series. Dana is being called out of retirement by an upstart champion named Hurricane Hernandez who wants to beat the best, namely Linda Lefty Lumaban. Hernandez never appears in the film, a surprising construction that avoids the paper-tiger villain and adversary we're accustomed to. Instead the story is about life outside of the ring, and often in the sack.

A terrific scene of Dana pouring her heart out during an interview with Bree late in the film is good enough, thanks to Vespoli's performance, to qualify as dramatics in any mainstream movie. But this is porn, and Dana keeps the dialog footage and story materials to a minimum just the way fans like it.

In the 1960s the legendary British sci-fi writer J.G Ballard wrote many experimental works, some of which like "Crash" and "High-Rise" have been made into feature films. Little known or mentioned anymore are his "condensed novels", a new art form which didn't catch on but for me was his greatest achievement. He set the challenge of writing a novel that occupied less than a page in print, just a few paragraphs capturing the characters, their development and the full story arc as minimally as possible. Like haiku in poetry, this challenge was daunting, but rewarding (note: they don't read like outlines but rather extremely concentrated short stories).

Similarly, Vespoli has heeded the call of the marketplace, and managed another difficult feat: producing moving, dramatic tales in which the explicit sexual content accounts for 90% of the running time -making the spurts of story & character count, but never threatening the zero attention span of a 21st Century audience that only wants (or rewards) XXX sex. Her colleague Nica Noelle pioneered in this format, founding the Sweetheart label some 8 years ago, and Dana carries on the minimalist story/maximum natural sex content tradition.

Besides the stars, there are effective turns by Alexis Texas as Dana's girlfriend named Alexis Texas (and a version of her real-life Adult performer status), Julia Ann as Bree's lover and Dani Daniels and AJ Applegate as dancer/prostitutes. Dana's frequent colleague and fellow director James Avalon is effective as actor playing her manager while young starlet Yhivi, with a new, much longer hairdo, pops up uncredited as her estranged daughter Angel.