MOVIE REVIEW : Sexual Power Fuels Porno World of ‘Kamikaze Hearts’

Juliet Bashore’s swift, complex and altogether challenging “Kamikaze Hearts” (at the Nuart through Sunday), a tempestuous, nonfiction love story, takes us into the workaday world of porno filmmaking. In this sometimes hilarious, sometimes degrading but mainly businesslike arena, Tigr Mennett, a scrappy gamin, tells us that she fell in love literally in front of the camera with porno star Sharon Mitchell.

Tigr has now graduated from acting to directing, and Mitch has come from New York to San Francisco to star in Tigr’s porno version of “Carmen.” It’s easy to understand immediately how Tigr--or anybody, for that matter--could fall for Mitch, for she has a dazzling wit and personality, a superb, supple body and a strong Anjelica Huston profile. Right at the start Tigr tells us that she fell for Mitch “not because she was beautiful but because she had this power.”

Power--sexual power--and its treacheries are what “Kamikaze Hearts” is all about. Mitch is a totally uninhibited, full-time exhibitionist whom we believe when she tells us she loves to engage in sex in front of a camera. She revels in her sexual magnetism, exerting it constantly. However, she herself is hooked on this power over others as surely as she is on cocaine.

Mitch, who prides herself on her honesty, seems to understand this but admits that she can rationalize away anything. She says she’s acting all the time, that she couldn’t do what she does otherwise, that “Sharon Mitchell,” her nom de porn, isn’t the real her. Yet we--and Tigr--begin to wonder whether there really is a “real” Mitch.

Made in 1986, “Kamikaze Hearts” (Times-rated Mature for drug taking, language, much nudity, some sex) has had at least two one-time-only local presentations. With each viewing it becomes clearer and clearer that the forthright and detached Bashore, a punchy, no-nonsense director with a wry sense of humor and compassion, does not share Mitch’s inability to distinguish between truth and illusion--something Mitch insists that she does not worry about.

But then Mitch, a fatalist who lives in the present as intensely as possible, does not believe in worrying about anything. What Bashore does so faultlessly is to take us into a world so often and easily scorned and into a relationship as passionate as it is skittish. She then wisely leaves it to us to sort out for ourselves what is true and what is fiction and how pornography affects those who make it, especially women.

‘Kamikaze Hearts’

Tigr Mennett: Tigr

Sharon Mitchell: Mitch

Jerry Abrahms: Gerald Greystone

Director Juliet Bashore. Producer Heinz Legler with Sharon Henessey and Bob Rivkin. Executive producer Legler. Screenplay by Bashore, Tigr Mennett. Cinematographer David Golia. Editor John Koop. Costumes, art director Hans Fuss. Set designer Fuss. Sound Leslie Schatz. Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes.

Times-rated: Mature (drug taking, language, much nudity, some sex).