Women Seeking Women 3

WOMEN SEEKING WOMEN had not yet reached its stride when Volume 3 was shot, and the result is rather antiquated, when compared to subsequent advances in lesbian cinema.

The three lengthy segments clash in terms of their content, probably as the fledgling Girlfriends Films labels was still in the "something for everybody" experimental mode. Casting is also all over the map, a sure sign of trouble.

Opening segment might be subtitled "For Wimps Only", as it portrays a somewhat idealized, sentimentalized view of lesbian love that would be laughable if these were films headed for Midnight Movie showings, rather than masturbation at home fodder. It pretends to be about real-life people, a fiction that cannot be sustained when the actresses turn into hardened gonzo veterans with the passing years.

Opening with a loving interracial duo of lesbians strolling through an orchard, it soon heads inside when the "just folks" pair, to judge by their down-market costuming, get down to business in bed. Odd couple pairs Sierra, a huge breasted, short Black woman who was unfortunately typecast not for her Sapphic tendencies but rather her vast floppy tits, with tall, thin and pale Lena Ramon, a graduate of the tie me up and tickle me fetish brigade.

Two forms of breast worship ensue: Lena dealing with Sierra's more than a handful and Sierra suckling on the pale girl's alluringly pointy nipples. Action is predominantly soft-core and romantic/sensual to a fault.

So director Rena, whose oddball porn career is an enigma to me, shocks us with the next two hard-boiled, nasty segments. Both are amateurishly staged and performed, I guess to up the gritty quotient but definitely counter-productive. The team of Nicole and Nikki, one called Kyla for differentiation purposes, return after singly performing in the very first WOMEN SEEKING WOMEN opus. A sense of deja vu is intensified by their appearing on the same plush couch backed by paintings used in Volume 1 for a different couple.

The resulting "first time" breaking in of a lesbian is poorly photographed and frankly distasteful, especially coming directly after the idyllic hearts and flowers content of Sierra meets Lena. It's your standard older/younger deflowering with a strap-on dildo routine.

Nastiness is upgraded to a higher level in the finale, which is rather ingenuously presented as a story requested by a fan of the lesbian video company. Michelle St. James is the big bad biker, a 21st Century different gender answer to THE LEATHER BOYS (a terrific British film I saw in first-run back in college in Cambridge 50 years ago).

She offers to help out stranded motorist Jewels Jade, but instead abuses the girl, with another dildo trotted out for good measure. Michelle's acting is so poor, this segment remains stillborn, and though I greatly admired the young Jade's tight, beautifully built body, she looks like she could take care of herself so her acquiescence to sex with the jail-house bully was phony. Typical of this segment's crassness is Michelle yelling "Suck it, slut!" when her dildo is properly affixed to her person.

Since Jade strangely resembles Anne Archer here (but with big tits), the violent encounter of the two dissimilar types reminded me of a very memorable off- Broadway play experience I had in the '80s. The real Anne Archer was co- starring with Susan Tyrrell in the Village in the play "A Couple of White Chicks Sitting Around Talking". The gimmick at that time was to have extremely brief runs and constantly changing to a new couple in the two-hander play.

I attended closing night for the duo, and the bickering and violent stagecraft seemed very strongly acted in the play. In the final act, Tyrell, who always seemed to be a loose cannon in her interesting film roles, really seemed to be pushing Archer around, and when it came for the customary bows and curtain calls at the end she actually pushed her out of the way, upstaging Anne literally. I never found out what really transpired, but it was a strange evening of seeing acting merely masking genuine enmity, and a far cry from the phony baloney action of Jewels and Michelle.