Cashmere (1999)

 

Director: Michael Ninn

Screenplay: Michael Ninn

Cast: Kylie Ireland as Penny Lane & The Lanettes / the Co-ed / the Lover's Lane Babe / the Pin-up / the Prom Queen; Vicca as a Go-Go Doll; Nikita as a Go-Go Doll; Shayla LaVeaux as Mrs. Kennedy / the Pin-up / the Cheerleader; Jill Kelly as Crooner's Lover / the Pin-up; Jeanna Fine as Sister Mary Francis; Anna Malle as Sister Francis Mary; RayVeness as the Pin-up; Brick Majors as the Drive-In Lover; Colt Steele as the Diner Guy

Ephemeral Waves

 

Bed time snacks make a girl crackle.

[Note: Cashmere is a pornographic film, but the version watched for this review is the softcore Redemption release. A British company who release titles in the United States and the United Kingdom, they have varied between the likes of Euro horror (Jean Rollin for example) to Japanese pinku softcore. They have also had a habit of releasing softcore cuts of hardcore cinema, this with some "strategic" close-ups among edits to alter the release for the more "easily offended" British public.]

Interpreting early sixties culture through late nineties shot-on-video aesthetics, I had high hopes with Cashmere as another delve into adult cinema's idiosyncratic tangents. It introduces me to Michael Ninn, a figure who starting in 1992 would become a significant name within the pornography genre for idiosyncratic titles like Latex (1995), a figure whose work embrace and work around low budgets (and video toaster and green screen effects) for fetishistic and ambitious looking productions. He is someone I am open to, regardless of my final opinion of Cashmere, as certainly going in he has an idiosyncratic premise even for a film for the sake of real sex to latch onto, embracing the aesthetic of early sixties and late fifties Americana, the touch of the titular Cashmere. Certainly having your lead actress Kylie Ireland duplicated as a whole girl group, Penny Lane & The Lanettes, for a 1961 set musical number is memorable for an opening for a porn film. Shots of a cinema, Ireland in a white ball gown as all the members, Lucio Fulci approved fog, and actual music, all very alien especially to a lot of modern day porn found online.

It is more eighties in aesthetic, by way of replicating the past, but when does an adult film in the modern day have actual musical numbers, one of many with different songs, with the music actually of some merit even if Casio backing music is used? Ninn to his credit, alongside an obsession with aesthetic (the latex costumes of Latex and Shock (1996)), has tried his hand at new directions, whether adapting those older films into Full Motion Video adult games, to Playboy's Dark Justice (2000-1), a softcore adult animated sci-fi show for Playboy TV. Cashmere's music is to its credit the best thing of the film, where even if some of the music reminiscent of a guitar magazine bonus CDs, the instrumental tracks to help teach guitarists new styles, the music in context is a solid quality with good vocal work. Even if it comes closer to nineties music (and Whitney Houston) the more they appear, they are unexpected in their existence within the film.

It does evoke Rinse Dream, real name Stephen Sayadian, the director of idiosyncratic films in the medium like Cafe Flesh (1982), especially when you learn the strange dialogue that has been repeated over scenes throughout verbatim - "Wrap me in a micro-mini" or "They're still stuck in the sixties" - were borrowed from Sayadian's Party Doll A Go- Go! 1 and Part 2 (both from 1991). Ninn's own production style, as stated low budgeted films which use video effects, and a lot of hazy aesthetic, is distinct especially as, contrary to my introduction to the film being set in the fifties, it is explicitly set in 1961 and the early sixties, right down to the eyebrow raising references to Jackie Kennedy. Played by Shayla LaVeaux in the famous (infamous) Pink Chanel suit suit, there is no sex scene with her, but she is evoked in the narration by the un-credited Michael Ninn, recounting nostalgic memories of that era against its iconography. It is very neon and tawdry, with blonde or pink bouffant wigs on the female cast, American diners and even a Cadillac used to have actors have sex on, but it is distinct to choose. Never was there a film, in tone with its bright bubblegum pinks and cheerleader costumes, where an Angora sweater or two would have been perfect and suitably erotic.

The immediate problem is that, rather than trying its hand at a series of vignettes or a narrative, Cashmere is a series of scenes of sex which whether seen uncut or in a censored form is repetitive and with not a lot else. The narration from Ninn himself really does not work, and you have the immediate issue with pornography that its length in scenes is endurance in terms of viewing, depending on a guttural arousal or lack of, and that this is a medium whose tropes about sensuality for many can be a bad cliché. (Or at least exaggerated to the point of its own logic which can be alien to a viewer's own eroticism or parodied). The paradox of pornography is also visible in how women are objectified, but they are figures who are lavished with diversity, the stars and with access to costumes and personas, whilst most male cast members in the case of a film like this are faceless figures. None of them are allowed to be more than stock figures - be they generic beefy men, scuzzballs or in a fake Clark Kent pair of glasses and wig - whilst another paradox exists in the variety of costumes and looks a female star can have. The moment in humanity's prehistory where women were to traditionally wear makeup and costumes is as much been one of our many failures as an intelligent species, but it has on the other side of the coin the advantage that, for all the fashion and aesthetic men can have, even traditional "feminine" fashion and cosmetics are so diverse there is the ability to use their variety to develop a person's individuality and even rebellion against norms, even in terms of not wearing makeup and dressing down as a more radical option.

Even in this film, where the audience is likely to be mostly male, the women in this film can play act, be figures of heightened (even absurd) femininity which can be dominant. Even if you have to bear in mind the film as a piece of pornography of the then-modern day which undercuts the illusion a lot, like the amount of tan lines, this does command a lot more visual power regardless of the explicit sex especially against the male actors, many of which do not even get IMDB profile pictures in the modern day and emphasis their status. No male actor, like LaVeaux playing Jackie Kennedy or heightening the cheerleader outfit, gets to riff on iconography either. One male is dominated by two leather clad dominatrix for his lusts for a schoolgirl, but no one is allowed to neither play in this world of dress up, nor become an eroticised figure that is in him as appealling and erotic even to a heterosexual male viewer. Even from a bias position as a cis-gendered heterosexual man myself, many erotica targeting male audiences tend to not portray men as physically pleasing in the slightest which Cashmere falls into the trap of.  There is no James Dean type - not the porn actor who, once a figure who drew female viewers to his work, sadly was revelled to be an utterly repellent figure, but the legendary Hollywood star of few films before his tragic end whose aesthetic style would have been perfect in this film's illusion, alongside many a greaser or rock 'n' roll figure. Even an Elvis impersonator would have been apt, in these early "wholesome" sixties, as there is a male sung musical number of a crooner, but this never goes anywhere.

Neither is the film, like Rinse Dream, going to challenge the viewer's sexual desires nor be inventive. The most diverse moment is what is described as "girl-homo", which is definitely a line of dialogue from a Rinse Dream film we never got, but is just a scene with only women which is not that illicit nor likely to win favour over for gay or bisexual female viewers even if, all wearing pink wigs, you could have had pure erotic camp. Honestly the disappointment with Cashmere is that, for a film about sixties iconography, one wishes it was not bothered with the initial goal of making a porn film and dared to sell itself as a pure wave of weirdo, nineties interpretation of early sixties chic.  Especially as this is pre-hippy psychedelic as well, which is a very distinct and niche aesthetic to sell, this could have been brilliant, even if still a string of sex scenes, if it had been a parody of a film or pop culture from the time.

The set up, with the opening music video even if all the members are Kylie Ireland, suggests a peculiar documentary of an old girl group, by way of dreamlike sequences of old childhood nostalgia, which if shoved further in detail would have been more. Even a "ghee whiz" parody of an old film or sitcom, like has become bread and butter in the later decades with porn parodies, would have been more rewarding especially as Ninn's aesthetic and production value is a leap above in terms of distinction. I would have preferred a narrative film, or an outright oddity, which just embraced trying to recreate an old film from the era with real sex, full of iconography like jukeboxes and quiffs on the studs. What you get are just surface level aesthetic on sex scenes which, even if you have the aesthetic strangeness of chessboard tile floors, or translucent yellow and red plastic pillars against fern trees, is still set dressing to sex scenes which have a lack of additional flair. Said scenes, if seen in a softcore form, do not even have what the film was meant to always sell, which is not appealing to another viewer either.

It does show Michael Ninn's virtues, but the final product could have been a much more different and more appealing production. As much of this I admit is merely the expectation of more to the film - i.e. more than a string than sex scenes. Certainly seeing screenshots of the film, and its heightened plastic sixties interpretation, even the stereotypical porn figures of the cast, does have a strange energy to it that is compelling, one that can be devoured and stretched. The issue is that, actually watching Cashmere, one wished there was more to work with than that energy.