Glimpse 10

t’s been a long cold winter but Roy Stuart is here to heat things up with his new Glimpse10, the longest and most musical of the series. There is a certain pleasure to find oneself on familiar ground. Anna Bielska starts the show and we’re off for two and a half hours of warm reunion where the spectator never feels like a passive voyeur. In fact, the whole Stuart, approach involves participation–big difference from the makers of commercial porno. Truffaut acted in his films, but rather poorly, Stuart as well, but rather well! Often mischievously leading the activities with kung fu action as well as sex action in several sequences where the camera and lighting equipment are often haphazardly included in the scene.

There is the famous vibro test, a cute young English girl calmly annonces that she is going to try out the Stuart vibrator. Her posh upper-class accent belies her intention to actually attempt anything more adventurous. But after some initial giggling she surprisingly applies herself to the task…Cyril Noymiss, our old acquaitance, amuses us playing the tough macho and then the tender guy. When Cyril attacks the girl in the street, she wins. (Not only Stuart but also the girls demonstrate their martial art’s skills). It’s a question of balance. No submitting to male imposition requiring for example, epilation of the female sexual area.

“A Shaven Pussy Is Ugly” sings Aviva illustrating a scene. And you won’t find any shaven ones in this Glimpse. Having said that, Stuart nevertheless shows no signs of returning to the war of the sexes. It’s tenderness that dominates in Glimpse 10. Although this time Stuart films the rape of a girl by a brute as well as another scene of male domination, looking deeper, you notice that in these scenes it’s the humour and tenderness that stand out. What classical porno flick would think of filming a girl against a postcard backdrop of Lisbon, pissing on the erection that is about to penetrate her? Very funny and exciting at the same time. The film gets it’s power from the gestures of sweetness, the beauty in the fluid movements of shared pleasure; I dominate you, I take you, but my hand carresses your hair, your arms, your thighs. I dance with you in elegant hotels. And mainly, I accompany you in communion, without fear into the beauty of the world…

The most beautiful scene is undoubtedly the one that ends the first part of the film. Roy films in a church, the religious robe of a choral singer partially opens and we see that which is liberated, movement of thighs under the light of the holy relics. Transgression? No, it’s affirmation. Borrowing from the poetry of Shakespeare’s “Cymbeline”, Stuart affirms here the urgency to live, to vibrate, freed from the burden of conventions, and without fear…

– Alain Deloffre

Fear no more the frown o’ the great,
Thou art past the tyrants stroke,
Care no more to clothe and eat,
To thee the reed is as the oak;
The sceptre, learning, physic, must,
All follow this and come to dust.