Rating: ★★

Cafe Flesh was a Porn Film that gained quite a degree of respectable acclaim when it came out. Largely it seems it did so because it added something more to the standard porn film – the veneer of an art film, where it has even been seen as social satire. The film was released in both hardcore and less explicit cuts, the latter playing in regular theatres, which served to gain the film a critical reputability.

Behind the pseudonym of director Rinse Dream is Stephen Sayadian, a name with a certain cult underground reputation. Sayadian began his career as a graphic artist and became Creative Director for Larry Flynt Publications. Under the Rinse Dream pseudonym, Sayadian directed Nightdreams (1981) and its two sequels, both pornographic films that venture into surrealist territory, followed by Cafe Flesh. Sayadian has made several other films, although his only non-pornographic one was a very surreal remake of Dr. Caligari (1990).

It may say about how little porn films had anything to them beyond sex scenes, but I was unimpressed finally seeing Cafe Flesh after reading about it for so many years and felt its reputation was surely overrated. Certainly, the one thing it does have is a very potent level of allegory to it – between a fertile few who are performing sex acts on stage for the rest of the populace who have been rendered sexually impotent. This could just as easily serve as an allegory for the viewer in a porn theatre or watching the film on video – the real performers are the ones on the other side of the camera, while the viewer is left in the solitary but impotent position of only being able to view their acts vicariously but never participate.

Stephen Sayadian approaches the film not dissimilar to the surrealist works he has made elsewhere, Each of the performances is a piece of bizarre staging that makes much of ironic juxtapositions. A woman is seated in an armchair while projected behind her are three adult figures in baby high chairs performing with dog bones and one a dildo, while a man in a rat mask carrying a milk crate comes in and teases the woman. She cavorts with him, doing assorted erotic things with his tail before this segues into a sex act.

In another scene, we have oil derricks projected on the wall while a naked secretary sits at a desk and typewriter asking “Can I type a memo?” over and over, while another woman is rogered on top of a table by a man with a large pencil-shaped mask covering his face and head. Another set piece has performers in phone booths and the act taking place on a wedge shaped table with the men wearing masks that resemble phone dials. In between these, the character of Max Melodramatic (Andrew Nichols), who anywhere else would be a drag performer, camps it up at the MC of the show.

Cafe Flesh works as a series of surrealist set-pieces. There is no real plot to what is happening. The porn sequences are nothing to write home about and are perfunctorily staged and photographed. The final sequence does feature later-to-be Scream Queen Michelle Bauer (although it is edited in such a way that while she appears nude it is not clear if it is her or a double when it comes to the penetration scenes).

Far less satisfactory is when you try to read the film as science-fiction. It has a thinly sketched out Future Scenario. Certainly, the idea of a world where the few remaining fertile people perform for those who no longer can suggests something of a Children of Men (2006) with a few twists further on the dial. However, beyond the basic set-up, the scenario seems scanty. There are various allusions to radiation and mutation, suggesting a post-apocalyptic world, but we get to see nothing beyond the realms of the club walls and the couple’s apartment.

There were two sequels Cafe Flesh 2 (1997) and Cafe Flesh 3 (2003), although neither involve Stephen Sayadian.

Clip from the film here