Alternately distressing, instructive, contestable, and fascinating, Juliet Bashore’s 1986 documentary about a lesbian couple working in the porn industrya cynical older woman (Sharon Mitch Mitchell), who is a seasoned porn star, and her lover (known as Tigr), who is an uneasy newcomer to this world, where drugs play a significant roleoffers a disturbing glimpse of the modification of bodies, feelings, and lives. The camera’s presence has a shifting role in the film, moving from seemingly impartial witness of certain events to stimulus and catalyst for certain others, and this tends to confuse and change one’s relationship to both the film and its characters. Rarely has the alienation implicit in the porn business been so tellingly exposed, but in the process of exposing the film raises a few questions about its own tactics and complicity. And it isn’t only porn that gets deconstructed; the central relationship between Mitch and Tigr seems to have been figuratively and literally taken apart. (JR)