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’…
What do you do when all eyes are on you? All hands are on you? Lips, spit, tongues, sweat, semen? In the second entry of HardWerk’s stripped-down-and-teased-out “Ask Me” docu-series, the camera is turned on Delfine Dahlia for a candid exploration of desire, sex and self. Through on-street interviews and breathless gang bang footage, it asks the question, “Where do you find freedom?” Is it in the wide-open spaces of Berlin’s Tempelhofer Feld or is it surrounded by a circle of waiting dicks behind the steel bars of a cage? For the filmmakers, the format provides an opportunity to put their full focus on the fucking, to create a production and take part in it at the same time, and to capture that ecstatic moment when fantasy becomes fact.
In the future where men have died out and their semen is the latest commodity. It’s a teasing role-reversal in which rough sex, facials and swallowing, traditionally viewed as objectifying women, instead turn men into little more than fantasy fodder and cum dispensers for a privileged princess.
