Ever since Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling Boogie Nights captured the attention and imaginations of would-be auteurs, and probably even before, the world of pornography has held a special hold on a certain subsection of aspirant directors, who’ve populated their movies with strippers and porn stars, looking to beguile and titillate open-minded film audiences before the first flickering frame of their film has even appeared on screen. Such subject matter can sometimes be a lazy choice, indicative of a filmmaker thinking the heavy lift of audience investment lies more in the setting alone than any particular combination of characters and story. All of which brings us to Sebastian Gutierrez’s Elektra Luxx, a comedy which tells the tale of an adult starlet who’s gotten out of the industry and turned to teaching an annex learning class on bedroom prowess, the better to fund her dreams of starting her new life as a single mother.



Carla Gugino stars as the title character, which goes a long way toward making the film engaging. Early on, she meets a distraught flight attendant, Cora (Marley Shelton), who approaches her with a proposition: in exchange for the purloined lyric sheets to the last album of Elektra’s recently deceased rock star lover, Cora wants Elektra to seduce her fiance, in order to “cancel out” her own cheating. Elektra reluctantly agrees, setting in motion a chain of screwed-up events and mistaken identities involving a private investigator, Dellwood Butterworth (Timothy Olyphant), and a passel of other largely fringe-dwelling types.

While such a plot condensation makes Elektra Luxx sound like a madcap farce, in truth it’s a much more character-oriented comedy, with a porn writer, Burt Rodriguez (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who loquaciously waxes nostalgic about Elektra’s career in his basement web-cam shows, even as he angrily discourages his younger sister Olive (Amy Rosoff) from doing a solo video, and uncomfortably deals with the advances of local checkout girl Trixie (Malin Akerman), who delivers a series of pictures of herself to him. What do these characters, or a couple others, really have to do with Elektra’s plight? Not much, although some are interwoven, here and there. Mainly, though, they’re used to provide a sort of tableau backdrop to the film, rendering it a sort of pornland Short Cuts.

The films and jumbled, referential style of Quentin Tarantino bear mentioning, too, since Gutierrez also seeds his movie with spun-off asides and backstories, not unlike Pulp Fiction. The chief problem is that these bits are not smoothly integrated into the final product, or made to have forward-reaching consequences. The Kill Bill films, of course, used the pregnancy of Uma Thurman’s character as the powder to spark a wild revenge ride, but Gutierrez here seems to have only loosely integrated the heady wonder of her condition — and the loss of her lover — into the proceedings. He gives us neither enough of Elektra’s backstory and life as a porn star for the pregnancy to stand in stark contrast as a life-changing event, nor evidences this richly in a major shift in her behavior, or sudden rush of manifested anxiety.

At its core, Elektra Luxx feels like it was designed around the conceit of an on-the-mend porn star, with a couple other characters and scenes thrown in. Things just kind of happen, and don’t always have lasting consequences. These moments can sometimes be fun (Adrianne Palicki and Emmanuelle Chriqui have a blast as Holly and Bambi, a pair of vacationing adult starlets, one of whose feelings give way to something unexpected), but just as often tedious, like a wayward improv sketch.

The strength of the movie is the game ensemble cast, who uniformly give lively, engaging performances — a testament to Gutierrez’s touch with actors, certainly. But when its endgame ropes in a novelist, Rebecca Lindbrook (Kathleen Quinlan), who wants to get into business with Elektra, and a book-signing that brings several characters together and ends with frantic sprint to a hospital, well… it all feels like a telenovela run amok. And no, not necessarily in a good way. For more information, click here. (Samuel Goldwyn, R, 100 minutes)