Star-crossed romantics Julie Simone and Joe Gallant aren’t lucky people. Both have kicked around the worlds of pornography, music, and daytime television, she beating the living shit out of sylphlike, quivering things in warehouses and he fusing porn with Beat poetry.
But on one special day—as captured in the feel-good romp “Submissive Slut”—Simone gets on the other side of the clothespins and Gallant finally finds a submissive proxy for a porn world that has treated him so cruelly.
This hour-long scene is all about wish fulfillment. Simone, looking blowsy and vivid in fishnets and a blue top, languidly masturbates whilst smoking. She’s a sullen thing, chasing her pleasures here, digging her treasure there, just not too quick about it. Of course she knows she’s lazing in Gallant’s garish red apartment when she should be out making money for the struggling couple.
When Gallant (represented only by a glove, because the other hand is holding the camera) comes in, he has seen it all before. And he’s in a vindictive mood.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” he asks. “Smoking and playing with your pussy, all fucking lazy and not fucking working.”
He slaps her, makes her smell his glove, makes her eat old french fries.
Then he casually mentions that “every woman in your family has those big fucking titties,” which to me lends the movie a nice, neighborhoody, working class hero feel; surely her mom knows how lazy Simone is, too, and thinks a good clothespinning might straighten her out.
As I watched this date movie unravel, I realized that there really is someone for everyone.
I called Simone in her dungeon in Queens with the hope of discovering where the couple was registered.
Grams: You’re usually the one applying the clothespins. What happened?
Simone: I find most male doms irritating. But Joe is sexually aggressive, not ridiculous. He’s not one of those “Call me ‘Master'” guys.
Grams: You both wound up back in New York after individual stints in L.A. What’s it like being back?
Simone: Mentally and spiritually, New York is a better place for me.
Grams: Your movies are not lavish affairs, even if cigarettes are getting more expensive. How much did this one cost?
Simone: I bought lunch.
Grams: How is “Submissive Slut” different from your other movies?
Simone: Everything is perfectly scripted in my other scenes. With this one, we just went with the flow.
Simone and Gallant met in Berlin in 2009 when both were in town for the Berlin Porn Film Festival (not to be confused with Berlin’s Venus Fair, which is like what the Adult Entertainment Expo would be if it were staged by David Bowie and Brian Eno). They kept in touch and decided to do a scene together.
What I like about these characters is that you get the sense that this episode of slutty lassitude has happened before and that it will happen again. All the time, you two! Simone wears an expression that Gallant is wired to want to slap off her face. And they found each other.
As the scene winds down, and Gallant extracts promises from Simone that, next time, she will bring a friend, he chokes her affectionately, and she gags as if to say, “I love you, too.”
“Don’t throw up!” he says. “I’ll fuckin’…strangle you.”
This, to me, is what couples’ porn is all about. I hope it works out between them.
Previously on Porn Valley Observed: Krissy Kage—life is suffering; Nick Manning and Sarah Jesse fuck of Dean Moriarty; Can you tell me how to get to “Avenue X”?; Joe Gallant—”The machinery is weird”; Tuesdays with Julie
See also: Julie Simone
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