Fox Dalliance

True to form – and perhaps even truer to non-binary lead performer Neen Sever – the third installment of HardWerk’s hybrid gang bang/interview series Ask Me is more than an invitation, it’s a provocation: ask me, challenge me, expose me, make me. For the filmmakers, collaborating with Neen revealed new possibilities for the format, the result a ‘gonzo-meets-psychotherapy’ exploration of identity and interest, where verbal communication is paralleled in visceral expression during a vividly intense industrial gang bang. As the cameras are turned on Neen, first under a leaden Berlin sky and later in the radiance of hot lights, flushed skin, burning handprints and undivided desire, the film finds its playground in the intersection between intellect and instinct, between the psyche and the physical, between ego and alter.

We are led – and almost literally so, leash and all, as lead performer Kleopatra appears blindfolded onscreen by the ring of a bell, the creak of an old wooden school desk, a nervous lick of the lips and three waiting figures. Hanging in the air with it all: anticipation, intention, veneration. It’s not for nothing that the filmmakers have adopted a slower pace for this intense gangbang – there’s a meditative quality to the echoing spanks and answering whimpers, to the push and the pull, to effortless dance of desire between the four participating performers; an absolute presence of mind and an absolute presence of flesh. As with the studio’s previous Triptychon film, the composition finds its own seamless choreography across multiple perspectives, so creating stunning juxtapositions between pain and pleasure; between a hand tightened around a throat and the easy laughter in each moment of disarming tenderness; between the polish of ‘pre’ and the primal of ‘right now’…

Chapter III of HardWerk’s Triptychon series delivers on the numbers in lead performer Sulema Vasquez’s first ever gang bang: three cocks slowly roused to rapt attention during a tender bondage session; a screen split into one, two and three perspectives, infinite nuances, a singular desire; and one rigger and several lengths of rope to bind it all together. But – as this format proves once more, this time in its most languid and meditative installment yet – a gang bang is not math but alchemy. Where attention should be divided, pleasure is instead multiplied, where the pace slows down, intensity – intent itself – is heightened, and where twists of knots should restrict and restrain, each whisper of rope over skin speaks of something liberated, something sensual and something sacred.