David Kittredge’s debut feature is a gripping, elliptical drama that deserves a better title than “Pornography: A Thriller.”
Although the movie deals with the lives of people who create and write about pornography, Kittredge steers away from the prurient potential in the material in favor of a dreamy, reality vs. illusion puzzle movie that is reminiscent of art house classics such as Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” and Robert Altman’s “Three Women.” (There is also a big dollop of Michelangelo Antonioni’s mystery-without-a-solution classics “L’Avventura” and “Blow-Up.”)
The Bergman and the Altman films inspired countless lobby arguments with their elusive approaches to plot and character — both directors avoided 
mainstream Hollywood conventions in a time when that sort of behavior from a filmmaker was respected. These days, people expect more answers to the questions posed by a movie.
“Pornography: A Thriller” played the festival circuit last year, and had a brief commercial theatrical release in the spring. Wolfe Video is releasing the film on DVD Tuesday.
It is amazing that Kittredge (left) could produce something so visually complex and challenging on a low-budget with only a 16-day production schedule.
The movie tells the story of a 1980s gay adult film actor who disappeared under mysterious circumstances, spawning underground rumors that he was the victim of a “snuff” film in which he was actually murdered.
After a longish prologue about the actor, we meet the main character in the story, Brooklyn writer Michael Castigan (the excellent Matthew Montgomery, above), who is working on a book about adult filmmaking when he stumbles on the story of the porn actor who disappeared.
Michael has a pal who runs a video store and the man eventually tracks down a tape rumored to be the underground snuff movie.
It is at this point that Kittredge starts moving us out of realism and into an unmoored visual and narrative style that will fascinate some and drive other people crazy.
Michael starts thinking that he is under surveillance and that his Brooklyn apartment might have been the scene of a murder (the way that Kittredge starts making a mundane setting seem sinister is reminiscent of the way Roman Polanski used seemingly innocuous apartment settings in “Repulsion” and “Rosemary’s Baby”).
The director leaves most of the decision-making on what is real and what is fantasy up to the viewer. In an interview, he said, “The film is predicated on people doing intimate things in non-intimate ways and the reverse, testing the bounds of intimacy. Characters learn the value of sex, what are you selling, exactly, when you sell an image of yourself having sex with somebody? What is the emotional cost? The monetized value?”
Kittredge might have done himself a favor in terms of audience acceptance if he had made “Pornography: A Thriller” slightly more lucid, but I enjoyed having my storytelling assumptions turned inside out in such a stylish manner.
