One of the fascinating things about porn is that it can succeed with certain ambitious concepts that generally fall flat in mainstream projects. Take first-person, POV movies. Although there have been mainstream movies with effective individual POV segments (think classic horror movies like Halloween), the concept has never mapped particularly well onto full-length features. The 1940s noir Lady in the Lake, shot entirely in first person, is an interesting experiment but a complete failure as a cinematic experience.
In porn, however, the POV feature is a workable, enjoyable concept, as evidenced by Yes, Professor, the newest movie from first-person brand Life Selector. It’s fairly common for adult movies to have a few sequences shot from a POV stance, but Life Selector goes all in. We experience the entire movie from the direct point of view of protagonist Professor Damien Walker, whose arms, legs, and, uh, other parts are played by porn performer Thomas Stone.
Walker is the newly minted head of the psychology department at an unnamed European university. We first meet him as he’s trying to settle his pre-term nerves at a friend’s cocktail party. Bored by the droning academics he meets there, he begins to perk up when he encounters the flirty, engaging Geisha Kyd. After some people-watching and playful banter, they go home together, where Damien gets his first taste of Geisha’s intimate charms. It’s a fun sequence, since almost all of us can recall the buzz of flirtation at a bar or party. Life Selector puts Geisha’s directly in eye contact with us for almost the entire sequence, from chatter to sex to climax, establishing immediate intimacy and rapport.
Damien soon discovers, though, that Geisha is not just another one-night stand. Dubbed the “queen bee,” she exerts a peculiar power over the university Damien teaches in, and she’s not afraid to wield it. He realizes she’s one of the students in his class on the psychology of human sexuality, alongside a bevy of other nubile college beauties. Appropriately, given the nature of the movie’s plot, he opens his lecture with a treatise on the particularities of psychological manipulation. It’s not long before Geisha’s bewitching sexual aura has Damien doing her every bidding. She pushes him to the edge by performing oral sex under the desk while he’s in a meeting. Soon, he’s blackmailing the university dean (Elena Lux) to win a turf war over departmental funding. In another scene, he coolly seduces Geisha’s stepmother (Angelika Grays) to help Geisha get hard – very hard – evidence of the stepmom’s infidelities. By the end of the movie, Geisha has coaxed him into a secret-society initiation where he’ll deflower collegians Alexa Flexy and May Thai in a foursome with BDSM undertones.
A closing drone shot surveys the university as Damien ponders what the debauchery the “queen bee” may next have in mind, presumably setting up Yes, Professor II: The Next Semester.
Baskin’s bottom line
Feature-length mainstream POV projects don’t work, because the varied needs of conventional storytelling quickly make such a monolithic approach tacky and ineffective. Porn has completely different goals. Adult movies often have a story to tell, to be sure, but the ultimate aim is to arouse and gratify. In porn aimed at cisgendered males, as most porn is, the male actor is typically an audience surrogate, anyway, even in adult videos that are not wall-to-wall POV. Shifting the entire movie into an outright POV perspective is a logical and effective choice. It’s fun to step into the shoes of the sophisticated, naughty Damien Walker in Yes, Professor. We get to sip a few cocktails and sample some European beauties, all from as direct a perch as possible without literally being there. If I have one tiny gripe, it’s that the voiceover, recorded by a booming F.M.-radio style performer, does not differentiate between Walker’s internal narration and the actual dialogue he exchanges with characters in scenes. It’s a minor factor but occasionally takes the viewers out of the moment.
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