madison ivy and darcie dolce in “they come in peace scene 1”

scene title: they come in peace [scene 1]
performers: madison ivy, darcie dolce
site: digital playground (mindgeek)
production credits: françois clousot (dir.)
trailer

l: madison ivy, r: darcie dolce

yeesh.

i have not wanted to weigh in on a talking point that a vocal contingent of girl/girl fans insist on repeating, which is that darcie dolce is a fake lesbian and should be unceremoniously booed out of the industry. on the one hand, i refuse to claim to be able to read people's hearts, and darcie's statements that she enjoys having sex with women are good enough for me. on the other hand, i have never once bought her in a scene.

which isn't to say she's a bad performer. she's definitely a weak actress, but that's different. (her casting here as some kind of, spoiler alert, emotionless alien is inspired.) she's an energetic and enthusiastic performer, which is all that many scenes require. she even on occasion manages to have chemistry with her scene partners, but what she never is is intimate. which might sound odd considering that a major requirement of her job is to be in close contact with female genitals (she's a girl/girl only performer), but it's always a show and never something shared between them. again, that's all most scenes demand. but while i always believe that she's enjoying herself, i never believe that her passions are engaged, which can make her scenes oddly sterile and mechanical despite her enthusiasm and the other performer's dedication to performing pleasure.

i have less to say about madison ivy because i don't think i've ever paid close attention to her before. she's a veteran of a decade's standing, and is consistently rated one of the top performers by producers and fans. she sold her half of the scene perfectly reasonably here, making sure to convey through dialogue how into the activity, and into darcie, she was.

the main trouble with the scene wasn't the performance of sex, it was that the performance of sex was practically all there was to the scene. it's the cold open to françois clousot's new feature, and we know nothing about these women other than that madison has high clearance somewhere and is bringing darcie home for a romantic night. i'm seeing a pattern, between this and quasar's closing time, of using a relatively anonymous girl/girl scene as the perfunctory introduction to a movie which with otherwise be occupied by more important boy/girl concerns once the plot gets going. the plot here doesn't kick in until after the sex, when madison attempts to suggest that it's time for darcie to leave, and darcie kills her then presumably (the special effects are awful) assumes her form in order to, uh, do something. what she does i'll never know, since i'm not watching the rest of the movie.

clousot's filmmaking is as polished as always, but there's a sense of overfamiliarity here: this is exactly the same kind of porn feature that could have been made ten years ago, or twenty years ago, and clousot has probably made something very like it a dozen times in those twenty years. i wouldn't be interested in the non-porn version of this story (sci-fi with an overbearingly ominous soundtrack), and seeing stylish filmmaking used as a substitute for an intelligent script, or really any script at all, doesn't inspire me with confidence.

performances: 22
cinematography: 23
editing: 16
script: 6
sjw points: 0

total score: 

67

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