Cherry Blossom

Feeling like a version of Howard Ziehm and Michael Benveniste's groundbreaking hardcore hit MONA - THE VIRGIN NYMPH as directed by Leonard Kirtman (or, perhaps more charitably, fellow Distribpix alum Robert M. Mansfield), it seems almost impossible to believe CHERRY BLOSSOM is the work of Jonas Middleton, future director of one of porn chic's finest crossover successes, THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS. What a difference four years make!

Somehow conformed perfectly to releasing outfit Distribpix's early hardcore style, CHERRY BLOSSOM's incredibly simple plot concerns Cherry, a young woman engaged to be married to her sweetheart, Jason, who's sent to live with her depraved aunt. Much like the heroine of Ziehm and Benveniste's more successful opus, Cherry is, appropriately enough, unwilling to give up hers before the impending nuptials, though she remains willing to provide oral to all and sundry.

One truly wonders if Middleton saw MONA before lensing this, as it follows that film's plot almost to a T: following a gratuitous - and abbreviated - scene of lesbian incest, we find Cherry unwilling to go all the way with her fiancé, forcing him to settle for oral, before sneaking off to bestow the same favors on friends Tiffany Mann and Marc Stevens. Meanwhile, poor Jason is forced to console himself with Cherry's aunt (as opposed to mother as in MONA). Expectedly, everyone convenes in the same apartment for a concluding orgy, where the prominent use of a grotesquely distorted fisheye lenses offers one of the few suggestions of the director's budding artistic (not to mention hallucinatory) ambitions.

Incest is the other main carry-over, and indeed it - along with sexual perversion and shame - remains one of the most compelling through-lines in Middleton's small body of work. On its surface, the topic's address here is more in keeping with the standard Distribpix flick, with the topic manifesting so casually it barely even shocks - though there's also a way to interpret that glib address as an extension of the characters' moral turpitude. The injection of a bizarre white coater-style framing device - the film's only sync sound scenes - which features a female psychiatrist or school counselor introducing Cherry's story while the protagonist sits off to the side - furthers this reading, with the narrator suggesting the broken home lives of both Cherry and her aunt are to blame for their depravity. Either way, it's hard to draw much out of those components in the same manner as LOOKING GLASS - it's more window dressing here, suggesting at best of a preoccupation the director hasn't quite worked out how to interrogate yet.

Of final note is the film's interest as time-capsule. Hailing from 1972, it certainly wasn't been the first film to cross the hardcore line (that would be its seeming inspiration, MONA), but it nevertheless plays fascinatingly coy, focusing almost solely on oral copulation until its end. Indeed, despite replicating the Judy Angel / Orrin North mother/boyfriend pairing almost perfectly, CHERRY oddly neglects to feature any explicit penetration here, which MONA built to like an act of near seismic cultural rebellion. Instead, the film arbitrarily moves to vaginal insertion during its penultimate encounter, between Marc Stevens and Tiffany Mann, neither central to the plot and thus robbing the switch all of its impact. It's one more odd touch to an already strange, cheap little film, a pale imitation of its West coast forebear that seems to know the words but not the music. Thankfully, director Middleton would find his own rhythm in short order, with a succession of superb follow-up films that marks one of the strongest one-two punches in XXX cinema.