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What are we to make of this curious artifact from the last days of theatrical porn?

In architecture and image, this is a porno movie to the core, but there is something different about it, some quality of otherness which separates it from its brethren and makes it unique. The story (there's a story, believe it or not) concerns a post-nuclear nightclub where "sex positives" perform sex acts for the benefit of the "sex negatives"--the 99% of the remaining population who no longer possess the capability. Enter Angel and Johnny Rico. Angel is a wide eyed virgin who is a "positive" in disguise and Rico is the legendary dick for hire--both of whom rekindle the sex drive in "negative" Lana. With me so far? Don't worry, it's just as silly on screen as it is described here at second hand--but the movie has other qualities to recommend it.

It is the way this is filmed which sets it apart. Part porno movie, part performance art, part grade-Z science fiction, part high camp--this is a blend of elements which drains the eroticism out of the tableaux staged for the "sex negatives" (stand-ins for the target audience, one assumes) and turns the entire thing into an acid critique of voyeurism which is at the same time defeated by the self-conscious artifice of its design, which demands that it be watched. The most striking thing about Cafe Flesh is the score, oddly enough, by long-time Richard Thompson collaborator Mitchell Froom (who is practically the only one here working under his own name, in front of and behind the camera). More than any other element in the movie, Froom's weird fag-end-of-New-Wave-proto-industrial music transforms bad theater masquerading as good pornography into something else entirely.

The real question becomes: Is this art? If admittance into the canon requires, as it does in the eyes of the law, only something to say beyond the awful thing in motion (and there is a lot of the awful thing in motion here), then I suppose it qualifies. It is interesting for reasons having nothing to do with prurient content. If you place more demands on art than this, then it fails. The artifice is pretentious, the subtext is overstated and stale, and the movie is just plain unpleasant to look at. Maybe it is art, but that doesn't mean that it isn't bad art.