When we first meet porn starlet Stacy Valentine in Christine Fugate's documentary The Girl Next Door, she's having makeup applied by an assistant before stepping onto a movie set. Typical of any actress.
Unlike most actresses, though, Valentine is having touch-ups done to her salon-tanned, Rubenesque and completely naked butt.
That pretty much establishes the tone for this unflinching and sometimes bittersweet look behind the flesh curtain at one of the porn industry's most recognizable talents, the star of more than five dozen adult films from Red Vibe Diaries to Sex Commandos.
Opening today at the Garneau Theatre, The Girl Next Door sees respected doc-maker Fugate culling moment after poignant/funny/horrific moment from her near-total access to Valentine's everyday life. The slickly edited result makes for an intimate and informative overview of the sex film business, as seen through Valentine's eyes.
We learn that she was born Stacy Baker of Tulsa, Oklahoma and seems to have entered life as a typical midwestern dairy queen, wide of face and dim of intellect. Until the day an unnamed jarhead ex-husband (whose face is blurred out in snapshots, presumably for legal reasons) convinced her to send her picture in to Gallery magazine's amateur section.
One thing led to another, and Baker went from Hustler shoots in Mexico to adult films, morphing into a surgically constructed Barbie meets Barbarella along the way.
"I know I'm good at sex," Valentine says by way of explaining her career choice. Later, she adds: "When I'm horny, I go to work. If I need affection, I have my cats."
The rest is history. History, when viewed through Fugate's lens, that includes moments like an ant attack during the filming of a sex scene, sharing hugs and tears with her semi-oblivious (by choice) mother and Valentine's on-again, off-again romance with a fellow porn star, who gets petulant during the film of a threesome scene when Valentine has sex with the other guy first. Talk about a whole new level of relationship insecurity!
(One telling moment has Valentine's best friend back home confessing she had no idea how to react when Valentine excitedly told her she'd filmed her first D.P. scene. As in, double penetration. Figure it out.)
It says something about The Girl Next Door that while there are several scenes showing Valentine at work, the most shocking footage is of her surgeries - the collagen injection into her lips, the brutal liposuction of her stomach and thighs and a truly cringetastic scene of her breast implant reduction. When the doctor removes an Olympic discus-sized E-cup implant and shoves the new D-cup bag of silicone in through the gaping hole where Valentine's temporarily detached nipple should be, it's tough not to wince.
Fugate skillfully dances the line between making us feel sympathetic and empathetic, and skirts around some of the more hard-core elements of the porn business while not treating it with kid gloves.
Ultimately it's about a nice girl meeting a dirty world and coming out on top. More or less. So to speak.
(This film is rated R)
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