Reviews (1)
Kira at Night is a bizarre and unintentionally funny attempt by a leading craftsmen of the American mainstream porn industry to make an art-porn film. Instead of a typical linear narrative based on any of the usual porn plots, the film offers up a would-be mysterious psychological spiral, where the lead actress, Kira Kener, plays herself and, at the same time, is played by the porn star Mercedez in reminiscent passages. Furthermore, the plot is set in the backstage environment of a theatre and the protagonist is dealing with an identity crisis, which is also indicated by the cyclical narrative. Instead of Lynchian porn, however, what actually happens is rather a lot of naïve faking of depth, where the absurdly half-baked narrative serves only as a vague bridge between sexual acts. We can see the film as the result of two competing tendencies in the context of the period productions from Vivid Entertainment, the dominant player in the field of mainstream porn at the time, which had all of the stars under exclusive contracts. Probably in an effort to compete with the other main player on the market, Digital Playground, though mainly in the face of massively expanding internet pornography with entities like Bang Bros. at the fore, Vivid Entertainment came out with a number of films that, in line with trends in internet porn, gave a fake impression of reality (the All About XY series, where XY is the name of one of the stars under contract), as well as a series of projects by which Vivid intended to enhance its reputation through supposed self-reflexiveness and ambition. This also involved the creation of a new image for the company’s leading stars, which was further supported by the fictional projects in which the actors appeared as if they were doing it for themselves. Kira Kener was thus stylised into an ethereally perfect actress elevated above ordinary performers, which is apparent not only from her part in Last Girl Standing, a formulaic, fictional behind-the-scenes look at the porn industry, but primarily from Vivid’s leading titles from 2004 and 2005. Besides Kira at Night, her image as a mysterious beauty was also burnished by the phantasmagorical meta-zoophiliac flick Bad Kitty, in which she plays a magical cat in human form, who seduces her owner, as well as her role in the deliriously misogynistic Les Bitches.
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