Glimpse 4

Another generously-crammed club-sandwich of a Roy Stuart video, with mostly tasty ingredients spilling out in all directions and in totally variable proportions. You never know whether a leisurely scene-opening is going to lead in to a brief short or to an extended twelve minutes or more. Two-minute prototypes here include a high-heel-teetering bookshop seductress, walking in to administer mouth relief to bemused Taschen browsers (may we have a second edition, please!), and a café-scene involving Cyril, a woman friend, a waitress, peeks up skirts on a spiral staircase, and a loo engaged when most needed. Then, there’s a remarkable brief episode of glory-hole “feetishism”, including a first-lesbian-kiss cameo delicately indicating one partner to be eager, the other just sort of dutiful
However, the opening scene is among the longer ones, and will likely be toughest of all for many. Accordingly, it’s bold of Stuart to confront us with it upfront. His incitative music gradually yields completely to the yelping climactic cries of its two women, plaintive and prehistoric. Beginning and ending as a lesbian seduction – in which the dominant of the pair eventually gets to strap on the double-headed dildo, which she wields unrestrainedly – it’s the near-brutal, unrelenting intrusion of skilled male fingers, hands, that produces much of the crescendo of crying, and orgasmic pissing too. Darkly filmed, the extremities of pleasure depicted here stay so insistently close to agony that most sensitive viewers/voyeurs will be asking themselves worrying questions. But, note, those questions will be real only because what we see is patently unfaked: I take this to be just the kind of quandary that Roy’s protean enterprise wants, from time to time, to put us in.

Other extended scenes include a not-untough one featuring long-haired ‘Joannie’ (heroine of the tattoo-parlour from Glimpse 1) again proving herself a live ready-for-anything trouper, to the hilt indeed. She well deserves Cyril’s and Brian’s kneeling to her in pleadingly erect homage – yet someone really should counsel her about that dire eye-shadow. Jollier scenes explore, say, the needs of a young housewife who will sit around short-negligéed reading fashion magazines when two well-built chimney-sweeps come to scour her flues. Or the pouting incredulity of a charming young mondaine when Lover A (Cyril again, stylish in lightweight suit and straw hat), having come upon her in bed (on bed, actually) with Lover B, unaccountably thinks he shouldn’t stay; naturally she presses the chap to change his mind. (Early on in that scene, just about everyone in the studio, including Anna B. and Stuart in person, suddenly piles onto or around the bed for an ebullient group-snapshot – yet, amazingly, our disbelief soon sufficiently re-suspends itself.)nnSo, lots of heterosexuality in this two-plus hours — including one or two beautifully slowed-down comings, spurtings, that make us hope there’ll be more such satisfying slow-motion work in later Glimpses. But, more than equally, plenty of young women startlingly exploring new and older ways of self-pleasuring: women dark and fair, solo or paired. My favourites here are the two sweet and demure girls who, realising they’re perhaps going to need only the one lesbian episode in their young lives, are seen occupying a hotel-room to honour the occasion properly. Their wild trampolining on the bed is as joyous an adult return to childhood as you’ll see; their mutual exploration largely gentle and tender. At one point a pair of rampant male cocks threatens to intrude, but Stuart shows good judgement in banishing those pretty pronto. Whatever may later have happened off-screen, this scene’s main lesson for us is surely about self-sufficient womanhood: males need the sensitivity to notice that they’re sometimes de trop, superfluous. (With luck, our times will come.) When, to pee, the girls move to (thank goodness) the bathroom, we see their shy mutual entrancedness just deepening further. And Stuart captures it, to close, via some classic-nude black-and-white frames, elegantly foregrounding the dependent volumes of unusually full (but natural) breasts.nnEqually memorable, though more intense and certainly more extreme, are a pair of women coupling sex to sex, linked hand to hand by the big double-headed vibrator. Filmed mainly from vertically above, their wheel of pleasure whirrs into another unforgettable bout of primitive orgasmic crying, first for one, then (filmed horizontally) for the other. The mouth of the first, as her pitch rises, becomes an increasingly perfect circle: having seen this, you may ever after find Histoire d’O a changed, a deepened, an unexpectedly literal title. A timeless three minutes.
More appreciation to end with: for the experimental white-out scenes, for the cautiously erotic policewomen hypnotising each other at panties-length, and for humour in variety: Anna’s cheeky cameos throughout, the blonde in the bath with masseur attendant, the scarlet-vinyl-clad apprentice dominatrix who drops her mask, and eases her zip, just a little too readily… and for other sisters in bewildering variety. May there be many more such woman-centred, man-assisted, moments to come from the land of Glimpse!

– Victor Westman