Private Movies 4: The Other Face of Pleasure Review

Reviewed by Nat Hocken  on  5/4/2003

What is “the other face of pleasure”? It could be, if you buy the storyline in this film, a more exotic, riskier approach to sex. But I think it’s something more fundamental than that and a little more fun. “The Other Face of Pleasure” is Antonio Adamo’s sly poke at himself and his traditional approach to porn.

Adamo’s fans may find themselves doing a double-take at this movie. It isn’t what we’ve come to expect from the director: same amount of sex, same crisp and clear photography, the usual beautiful girls, but with a different emphasis. Adamo, who adores anal sex, provides only two examples of it in six scenes. Each includes double-penetration, another Adamo favorite, but—just twice? Somehow it doesn’t seem right. And what about his money shots? All his actors cum, of course, but not one of them is allowed to do so on his partner’s face; they’re forced to aim instead for her tits. This complete disregard for the facial is damn near sacrilegious for an Adamo film. The other face of pleasure, it seems, is a lighter, more traditional form of sex. For Adamo, anyway.

Maybe he had the couples market in mind, but again I don’t think so. I think he had his entire body of work in mind. Adamo isn’t known for his lesbian scenes (at any rate, he shouldn’t be known for them), but he gives us one here (featuring Jodie Moore and Cleare) that’s almost good. Jodie eats out Cleare fairly effectively and the two close out the scene with a nice 69. Later, during a fivesome, Lynn Stone almost has you believing she actually likes pussy when she goes down on Alyssa first and Cleare later.

Though I admire Adamo’s willingness to direct against his own style, and while I think this is one of his better films as a result, he doesn’t take his little joke quite far enough to make the movie a winner. He focuses too much on altering the usual sexual progression of his scenes and not enough on changing his approach to them. His girls are still too busy looking at the camera, still too active shifting positions to cum; he still pitches the natural sounds of his actors below the music track; and he still slows everything down on the screen—it’s as if he knows his actors are performing rather than participating in the sex, but remains convinced that slow motion will generate the erotic energy they can’t.

Bonus materials on this disc include a behind the scenes featurette, the trailer, cast bios, a photo gallery, and production notes. This much is the same as with any Adamo film. As for the feature itself, I kind of like Adamo’s other face, but I think he needs to exercise its muscles a bit more to give it (and us) a truly different expression of eroticism.