Bizarrely, the plot of Fashionistas is much the same as the plot of "Cyrano de Bergerac"; the general outline is the same, although the details are necessarily different. For instance, Cyrano does not, at the end of the Edmund Rostand novel, nearly choke to death on Roxane's enormous penis. In The Fashionistas, Rocco Siffredi (a la Roxane - the object of desire) is an Italian designer being courted by an emerging fashion design company owned by Taylor St. Claire (in the Christian de Neuvillette, dumb guy role) who is hot but not that smart and thus has to rely for inspiration on the ideas of Belladonna (Cyrano - the smart guy). In order to make Bella Donna appear to be unremarkable and in the background, she is, when first seen, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, which she immediately and uncompromisingly discards.

That said, all resemblance to Cyrano de Bergerac, and indeed to any literature at all, ends there. The real attractions in the movie, notwithstanding Belladonna's bottomless throat, are A) the fetish wear by real life fashion designer Syren, and B) the fact that Stagliano treads dangerously and maybe actionably close to making a hardcore bondage film. In addition to its content, the production values are comparable to the best of adult's efforts, which is to say Michael Ninn or the higher-end Private releases, but still not quite Hollywood mainstream quality.

Hollywood or not, though, the thing is definitely a phenomenon, the clearest indication of which is the fact that it's not only a movie, it's a Las Vegas stage extravaganza, too. By all reports, it's a combination of a softcore cable edit and a Cirque du Soleil show - occasional nudity, fashion galore, and music by Madonna, Tool, Lords of Acid, Crystal Method, and Led Zeppelin. One friend who went said it was worth the trip just to see the costumes. If you go, watch the movie first, or you won't be able to follow the plot. A key point in the film is the plucky little leather-and-latex fashion company doing everything it can to break out in the mainstream, and that is exactly what Stagliano has done by creating and producing the show, which is a tribute to the Stag's perseverance and vision. He envisioned the movie as a Vegas dance show even before it pulled in a staggering 22 AVN nominations, of which it won ten, making it the Lord of the Rings of the porn industry, and in spite of huge obstructions both cultural and technical, got the thing staged, to critical acclaim.

It hasn't inspired too many other really ambitious imitations yet; the other companies that shoot on film and aspire to plot-driven greatness aren't leaping on the huge (by porn standards) budget bandwagon, no more than usual, anyway, and they certainly haven't achieved anything like its cult status. It would be great, though, to see the industry parody its own biggest success the way it does with mainstream Hollywood movies, wouldn't it? Visions of "The Assanistas" dance in my head. One of the reasons may be the film's fetish content. We know there are rules about such things, but Stagliano may have bent them as far as they can be bent, in the Lenny Bruce/Larry Flynt sense of the word.

Although the Vegas show was carefully engineered to break no rules and offend no sensibilities, at least none that wouldn't balk at any other Strip offering, the film is a different animal. One friend, who you might call a hardened porn aficionado, was shocked, not quite sure whether or not to be offended by the heavy-duty bondage and domination mingling with the hardcore sex in "The Fashionistas".

In addition to furthering Stagliano's famed obsession with callipygian hindquarters, to the extent that there's nary a character in the movie who isn't at one time or another being asphyxiated by some shapely backside, there's a darker tone - near-rape, whips, chains, slapping, spanking and spitting all mix in a way that you probably haven't seen on film. (Or, at least, since the lawless old days of the Seventies, when you could do anything you wanted because Congress ignored porn, partly because some of them were funding it. Check out Alpha Blue Archives' reissues of Long Jeanne Silver or Anyone But My Husband for examples of stuff from the really dirty old days.) There are other movies that have taken the S&M ball and run with that theme, like Jim Powers' Dementia and Dementia 2, but none that have done so with the flair and style, not to mention budget and quality, that The Fashionistas brought to the table.

I have another friend who wants to make a "good" porn movie with a real plot, and I've always told her you couldn't do it because with, say, five fifteen-minute sex scenes, you'd only have room for fifteen minutes of plot in a ninety-minute movie. Now Stagliano has gotten around the problem by simply making the movie nearly five hours long. Let's hope porn follows his lead in producing movies that are high-quality, high-budget, and that push the envelope for people who like the unusual. -- by pweasels