Genre: Transsexual

Director: Andrea Nobili

Cast: Vittoria Risi, Mireja, Lanny, Flavia J., Vaneska, Linda

Audio/Video: Shaky, slurred movements and garbled audio; I paused the DVD to google “stroke symptoms” because it hadn’t occurred to me that watching a video could make me feel so sick and disoriented.

Length: 2 hours, 37 Minutes

Release Date: Sometime in 2016 (not stated on cover or site)

Extras: Photo Gallery

Condoms: Yes

The Rae Of Light: I’m not gonna do what you all think I’m gonna do and just FLIP OUT about how films like this contribute to the violent othering of trans women. In fact, I wanted to like this. I love women with cocks; I love the kind of hustle that allows women to stretch out the novelty of having cocks to fill out over 40 films worth of mouths and assholes. I saw “Italian Shemale” and let my optimism tip-toe through the tulips, imagining Mediterranean women riding vespas and trading blowjobs at espresso bars overlooking villas paid for with the sweat of their luscious, pulsating cocks.

What I got instead is the slice of dragged-out, low-effort hell that awaits all of you who don’t believe in paying for porn. It’s like projecting yourself onto the astral plane and then having your aura or essence or whatever slowly murdered with a wooden spoon.

The scenes are shot 1) in rooms with no natural light, 2) with harsh, oppressive fluorescent-esque lighting, 3) with so much fucking white set dressing, whether it’s the roman columns, medical labcoats, or hospital set pieces, that reflect the light back. This makes all the performers look like they’re waiting for an autopsy. You see every pimple, every patch of stubble—blowjobs are encased in harsh shadows, and everyone’s makeup looks aggressively off-palate.

And it’s blurry. The screenshots I’ve selected weren’t cherry-picked to highlight the quality of filming; just about any movement, from the performer or the camera, causes a motion blur. It’s like having a zit on school picture day and you‘re bleeding into the fourth dimension.

Likely because this film was made by non-Americans for an American audience, there is very little dialogue compared to American-produced porn I’ve seen; what speech you do here is barely intelligible. Instead of not alienating me as an American viewer, a scene of two trans women jerking off in complete silence creates an uncanny valley-like response of panic and discomfort. I want to believe “suck my dick” is a readily accessible phrase in Europe. There’d be at least some novelty of a room of people repeating that at each other, removed of context. I might have been moved to give this movie a rental recommendation based on that alone.

3 of the scenes involve trans performers in some sort of fishnet body stocking, which are, in addition to unflattering, functionally baffling. YOUR WOMEN WHO HAVE COCKS. YOU DON’T NEED A UNIFORM TO DIFFERENTIATE YOURSELVES FROM THE CIS PERFORMERS.

Scene 1: Vittoria Risi leads an unnamed guy in a leather mask that is too big for him and not even laced up into a room where Mireja and Flavia are sitting on a couch, stroking their cocks. What follows feels like a lewd propaganda film about the evils of trans women. After fucking herself with a glass dildo, Vittoria proceeds to (silently) blow Mireja and Flavia, choking herself on their cocks multiple times, to the point where she can be seen visibly crying. Then we get an awkward spitroasting of Vittoria by Mireja and Flavia, all without any real verbalization that anyone enjoys it.

The official webpage for this film describes Flavia and Mireja as “two trannies ready to break the Venetian lady.” This is the kinda-rapey-porn version of playing an old video game in the 80’s and finding out the blue dot is a heroic servant defying the feudal regent (played by the red dot).

The guy in the leather mask doesn’t really do much but flicker his tongue and jerk himself off in the background before Mireja breaks away from the double team to jerk off on his shirt. I fail to see the need or novelty of this guy—is dudes leering at you with a hard-on in the background while you try to make out with another girl like, a rarity in Italy? What’s the fantasy there?

Scene 2: Linda and her dude (the men in this film go uncredited) re-enact your standard late night softcore porn—they dance, they flirt, he nibbles at her cock through her underwear, she gets up on the bed and teases him by touching herself. It’s actually kind of romantic and charming. Linda is sultry and elegant and the guy is so, so into it. And when he sucks her dick, he takes it all and doesn’t choke. Score one for patriarchy, I guess.

With a better director or camera-person, this could have been the scene that warrants renting the DVD. Instead, we get lots of unneeded close-up shots of penetration, which obscures the tender fucking with lots of obstructive pubic hair. The director strikes me as someone who knows trans porn will sell, but doesn’t understand or appreciate it, so he just occupies himself with constant movement so at least he can insist the films are engaging or action-packed.

At least it explains the “ACTIVE TRANNIES” graphic on the cover.

I’m reminded of Red Hot Chili Peppers’ drummer Chad Smith performing a basic beat at a drumming seminar to demonstrate that a master percussionist knows when to keep it simple. I’m not a huge RHCP fan or anything; it was just one of like a million things I occupied my mind with so as not to begin fantasizing about all the maladies and misfortunes I wanted to plague director Andrea Nobili so that he can give up directing shitty porn films so he can focus on bigger picture stuff, like hiding from the 20 foot robot made of bees programmed to hunt him across time and space.

Scene 3: Vaneska is a doctor (or maybe a nurse practitioner) who shows her patient some X-rays and then proceeds to wash his mouth out with cock. The men who appear in this film all look like they’ve definitely witnessed something illegal and did nothing to stop it.

Power dynamics are not like bricks which can be stacked up, like a luxurious parfait. The “doctor/patient” and “trans woman/bottom-y cis dude” dynamics are, when you strip away the societal factors, static top-down power dynamics, and merging them doesn’t create some hot hybrid of filth. Now if you were gonna have like a femme dude, and the trans woman doctor’s all like “I’m gonna give you tits and make you a lady” and he’s all “no I’ll hate that” and she’s all “well I’m hot as fuck and after I fuck you hard and show you the sexual capital I possess you will want that too”, that could put a little more burn in your candle. But that would require some audible dialogue and a cameraperson who didn’t close-up on thigh pimples and butt hairs at every opportunity.

Having all your trans performers wear fishnet bodystockings that obscure large swaths of their skin prevent your viewer from developing an earnest appreciation of their bodies. It suggests you think the only parts of trans women people could ever be interested in seeing are their faces, and cocks (while the bodystockings make room for their tits, they end up looking like a chest plate or some other costume). As someone who has kissed some trans women’s feets and armpits in my day can and will attest—I don’t care if my mom’s reading this—every part of a trans woman can be erotic and fetishized if you give them the chance. Just like cis women! Equality!

Scene 4: You can apply everything I said above to Dr. Lanny and her patient—my only note that separates the two is that Lanny’s fishnet bodysuit make her look like a Santa’s helper about to be referred to HR for her refusal to conform to dress code, which would have made a much better scene.

The lighting, camerawork, and wardrobe of the trans performers feels like Andrea Nobili was intent to go out of his way to make the trans women look as unfeminine and unattractive as humanly possible. Did he do this to drag out the fetishizing of trans women? Is he trying to, in the face of greater acceptance and media visibility of trans women, offer an alternative product that presents them as ugly and predatorial to conform to the politics of the type of people who criminalize trans existence but consume copious amounts of trans erotica? And are those people buying these films, specifically? Did anyone buy this film? How did 44 of them get made so far?

You can ask yourself a lot of difficult questions with complex, possibly unanswerable questions when you spend two and a half hours watching porn with grit teeth and an uneasy emotional cocktail, equal parts affronted and nonplussed.