So, fashion pinup Lidia is married to beartastic Michelangelo, who is cheating with Sandro, a big slut who ends up fucking former model Marthe and canoodling with current model Xenia even though he’s married to Montreal’s hippest boutique owner, Piero, a “gold star gay” who’s never, ever known the feel or taste of pussy, except — spoiler alert — he will, before the credits roll.
Got all that?
I always wanted to make a fashion movie — it’s a glamorous world on the surface, but there’s a lot of psychological stuff underneath — and I’m a very referential filmmaker.
Welcome to Bruce LaBruce’s fashion world bedroom farce, “The Affairs of Lidia,” produced by the acclaimed maverick indie filmmaker and occasional queer pornographer, with the funding and blessing of Lust Cinema, the prolific Barcelona-based art-porn studio led by Erika Lust.
The convoluted, old-school-farcical comings and goings of “The Affairs of Lidia” revolve around the stunning charms of Skye Blue, a one-of-a-kind porn performer with a background in mainstream fashion modeling, sporting an instantly iconic platinum short-haired do and a veritable cavalcade of, as TikTok Nation would say, lewks and fits.
When she’s not licking and mounting the rest of the cast, regardless of sexual orientation, Blue sashays and shimmies under LaBruce’s tutelage through Old World-evocative Montreal locations in an array of getups designed to dazzle the discerning eye.
“The Affairs of Lidia” is the rare porn movie that pulls off also being an “outfit movie,” a screwball comedy, an homage to a certain late-1960s/early-to-mid-1970s horny vibe, an easter-egg mine for attentive cinephiles and a polymorphous fuckfest. In other words, a Bruce LaBruce film.
“Lust Cinema approached me and they asked me if I wanted to do a porn feature,” LaBruce told XBIZ, in an exclusive interview via phone from Argentina, where he was presenting the world premiere of the softcore version of “The Affairs of Lidia” at the prestigious world cinema showcase Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Film.
“Lust is an ethical, feminist porn company,” the director — best known for unflinching, complex looks at gay male relationships — continued. “Their films are more from the female point of view, more about female pleasure and subjectivity, which is something that attracts me. And also they are very much narrative-oriented. In a sense, some of what they produce is more old-school, 1970s-style porn. They’re also more open to comedy, drama, complicated plots, something more conceptual, much more eclectic and interesting to me.”
This is LaBruce’s first feature project for one of Erika Lust’s studios, having previously helmed shorts like the gay scene “Refugees Welcome” about a Syrian refugee in Berlin, “Scotched Egg” and “Valentin, Pierre and Catalina” which LaBruce calls “a porn version of Truffaut’s ‘Jules et Jim.’
LaBruce explained that he and Lust were introduced by one of his producers, who wanted to work with the Swedish-Spanish feminist porn figure. The director originally wrote a long outline for Lust, and then he and the studio collaborated on the story, setting and casting ideas.
“They have very specific kind of criteria in terms of the kind of sex they want in the film,” LaBruce explained. The resulting project crystallized around the figure of Lidia, embodied by the statuesque, Hitchockian blonde Skye Blue.
“I always wanted to make a fashion movie — it’s a glamorous world on the surface, but there’s a lot of psychological stuff underneath — and I’m a very referential filmmaker,” La Bruce told XBIZ. “I usually start with different films that I really like and taking certain parts of the narratives or certain dialogue or scenes, and then I rework them. The trick is to then make them into your own style.”
LaBruce’s conceptual mood board for “The Affairs of Lidia” included photographer William Klein’s Paris art fantasy “Who Are You, Polly Magoo?” (1966), Jerry Schatzberg’s “Puzzle of a Downfall Child” (1970) and Berry Gordy’s Diana Ross vehicle “Mahogany” (1975), all films dealing with neurotic models navigating a predatory fashion industry.
Another key image was the poster for Paul Mazursky’s 1969 swinger comedy “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,” which showed two slightly awkward couples sitting up under the sheets together.
“That great movie ends up with two couples in bed at the end of the movie, but I made five people instead,” LaBruce laughs.
“The Affairs of Lidia” indeed climaxes with a pansexual orgy bringing together the model, her husband, his male lover, his husband, plus Lidia’s friend Marthe — played by very experienced U.S. performer Vanna Bardot, who brings a healthy dollop of enthusiastic American porn bravado into the artsier ambience of the other pairings.
Other influences not mentioned by LaBruce but that will be apparent to any film addict include: pop art in general, as there’s something of Guido Crepax’s Valentina to Lidia; pop pope Warhol, with split screens that take one back to “Chelsea Girls”; early Almodovar; and — quite obviously, given the impeccable styling of Skye Blue — the icy blondes up to little good served up again and again by classic cinema’s top perv, Alfred Hitchcock.
LaBruce takes full advantage of Blue’s figure and poise, both in her shrine-to-herself home and skulking around Montreal while spying on her errant husband, building her up as the porn version of peak-period Kim Novak.
The movie’s stills are instantly memorable: Blue in headscarves snooping around in magnifying opera glasses, Blue trying on fashion-forward couture, Blue in surreal lace masks, Blue wearing very little, Blue wearing nothing at all, Blue pre-coitally covered in a bukkake of red, white and blue paint, like a Pageant of the Masters version of a patriotic Jackson Pollock.
“Bruce doesn’t shoot a lot of straight sex scenes,” laughs Skye Blue months later at a downtown Los Angeles rooftop bar, now sporting Daenerys Targaryen-length blonde tresses. “So I had to remind him that I needed to wipe some of the paint off ’cause I’ll get a yeast infection and I won’t be able to work for the rest of the shoot. In gay porn he doesn’t have to think of those things!”
Blue felt that, in many ways, the role was tailor-made for her. In fact, she originally moved from her native Florida to New York to pursue a career in mainstream modeling, only to be dropped by her high-profile agency when they discovered she was camming on the side. She then found a social home in the metropolis’s thriving fetish and nude photography community, and continued securing modeling jobs on her own as the stigma against booking sex workers slowly began to ebb among some clients and photographers.
“When I read Bruce’s script, I said, ‘This is gonna be so easy — this is perfect. I know this person. This is me.’ Honestly, I just put myself into Lidia’s shoes,” Blue explains. “I came from a fashion background. And obviously, if my husband was sleeping around with other men, I’d want to go around and fuck them too — to get even!”
She spent her first day in Montreal being fitted for the extensive sartorial changes throughout the film. “I tried on clothes like a madwoman for probably five hours,” she explained.
Having been given a pre-shoot note by Bruce to aim for “Brigitte Bardot, but bitchier,” Blue took to the role with gusto. She is clearly having a lot of fun, and taking full advantage of the Erika Lust commandment to performers to not be “porny” and exude a natural organic vibe just as the characters would.
“I’m on a porn set five or seven times a month, definitely not as much as the other girls. My biggest thing is shooting my own content,” Blue said. “So it’s natural to me to perform like that.”
Adding to the novelty, in terms of things unusual for a mainstream adult title, was that Bruce drafted the male performers from the world of gay male porn. Blue and Bardot were joined as top-billed leads — and in the final orgy — by hirsute superstar Markus Kage as Lidia’s cheating husband Michaelangelo, Drew Dixon as horndog photographer Sandro and CockyBoys dreamboat Sean Ford as lithe, pussyphobic fashion designer Piero. Mainstream Montreal actress Pascale Drevillon completes the cast in a supporting, non-sex role.
Before the November 2021 shoot, LaBruce posted a casting notice through social media with the goal of creating a diverse pool of talent willing to go through his indie film boot camp in Montreal — during one of the peaks of COVID-prevention protocols — for a full week of 14-hour workdays.
“This film is meant to be a trifle, a confection, light in tone — a somewhat affectionate satire of the fashion world. But it’s actually really hard to make something this light and frothy,” LaBruce told XBIZ.
Before “Lidia,” the filmmaker had been occupied with wrapping and releasing the much more serious “Saint-Narcisse,” a queer-themed fable about self-discovery and self-regard which did well in mainstream festivals.
Narcissism, of course, is one of the most obvious themes of “The Affairs of Lidia,” a film that begins with extreme close-ups of a sex act between Lidia and Michelangelo, culminating not with her climax, but with a post-orgasm checking-in with an ornate hand mirror she keeps close by. Enormous portraits of each of them loom over the domestic scenes that illustrate their marital problems.
“Making a movie about fashion, it’s hard to avoid the topic of narcissism,” LaBruce said. “But it’s also something that is a really prevalent mood or zeitgeist in society. It’s just everywhere — the whole development of selfies, people posting airbrushed pictures. There’s a certain amount of vanity that is permeating all of social media and culture in general.”
This IG-ready zeitgeist is yet another way in which Skye Blue’s eye-grabbing figure and face turned out to be ideal for this project. A few minutes of walking around the bustling Arts District of Los Angeles make it clear that she is literally a head-turner — the hippest thirst-trap come to life.
“It’s all about influencers now,” she said. “It’s not what you may do — like it was when my modeling agency dropped me — it’s about how many followers you have.”
As current NYC “It girls” like Julia Fox and Rachel Rabbit White show, it is possible nowadays to straddle the line between sex work, hip influencing and the mainstream.
“I lived in Williamsburg and got into the sex scene,” Blue explains. “I started getting traction in the very niche adult model circle. A lot of brands there started reaching out to me, and I worked closely with the big branded sex clubs.”
As a veteran of — as SNL’s Stefon would say — “New York’s hottest night clubs,” Blue was also very familiar with LaBruce and his celebrated films and erotica when he tapped her for the role.
“He’s very big in all the culture I was around, in Brooklyn and NYC,” she explained. “The gay bars all play his movies, so I had known about him and when he reached out, I went ‘Oh, wow, iconic! This is amazing.’ I’ve always wanted to work with him. He knows a lot of other people I know in those circles as well.”
Ultimately, Blue told XBIZ, “The Affairs of Lidia” thoroughly fulfilled all her expectations about becoming, in Julia Fox’s immortal words, “a muuuuuse” to the celebrated auteur.
“I thought it was so beautiful,” Blue gushed about the final product, now streaming on LustCinema.com. “I thought, ‘Yes! All of that hard work paid off, those hours and hours of going over the script.’ Every single take, we must have done it at least 12 times, just to make sure Bruce had the right one. And the result is so meticulous. It is gorgeous.”
