Games in Shadows
The plot - and there's a ton of it - is well summarized on the Thunders Arena website. It's a tale of lust wished for and then satisfied. It's part fairy tale and part ritual abuse. There's abduction, seduction, and destruction. This is Thunders' most ambitious project to date - its Apocalypse Now. Tristan and Dom9 play against type, and their performances can't be improved on. It's the company's most brazenly erotic production.
The pace is hypnotizing, aided by camera movement that rolls in and out like waves on a beach - or pelvic thrusts. The introduction, in which Tristan strokes himself while looking at muscle shots of Dom9 on his cell, is underlit and grainy like old-school porn. Even as the action moves Dom and Tristan towards brighter light sources, the shots are backlit moodily, like the interiors in The Exorcist and Blue Velvet. Tonally the shots are perfect, suggestive and palpable without actually crossing into porn - or even full nudity.
The action is divided into two parts. Part 1 is just short of twenty minutes and contains Dom9's abduction of Tristan, who comes to in Tom of Finland-style leather gear, cuffed to a bathroom sink. It ends shortly after Dom coerces Tristan into a lacy party-girl skirt to make him officially a bitch. Part 2 is about eighteen minutes long and opens as Dom9 puts an ottoman on top of a prostrate Tristan and sits on it. The second part has more wrestling action on the floor and on the bed. Tristan turns the tables on Dom, but the question is Can he make it stick? In the end, the victor hauls the vanquished off to another room - for further developments, which are coyly left to our imagination.
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