December 2004 Cover
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By
Giacomo Tramontagna
Backstage
Rating: 2 Stars
Produced by Lucas Kazan and Ettore Tosi. Directed
by Lucas Kazan. Videography by Leonardo Rossi.
Edited by Egisto Mastroianni. Music by Giuseppe
Verdi and NYLOC. Starring Sasha Byazrov, Giorgio
Salieri, Matthias Vannelli, Eric Flower,
Max Veneziano, Mario Perez, David Scott, David
Havien, and Ricky Martinez.
How to order
Since 2002, producer/director Lucas Kazan has been creating gay-porn variants of minor Italian
operas-- L'Elisir d'amore, I Pagliacci, Cavalleria
rusticana-- with sometimes hot, sometimes ludicrous, mostly coherent results.
Backstage threatens to be Kazan's homofication of
a larger piece, La Traviata, but it's actually a scattershot, behind-the-camera look at a gay hardcore production based on Verdi's popular masterwork. It's badly flawed. Some shots
are non sequiturs; the continuity is full of holes. Many viewers will wonder what the hell is going
on. It would be interesting to know what happened backstage at
Backstage, on and off the set, to turn it into the mess that it is.
What's decipherable is that round-faced Giorgio Salieri, the director of the porno version of
La Traviata, lusts after Sasha Byazrov, the star and apparent Marguerite Gauthier figure. Toward the end, as he watches the beautiful, feline Russian perform, Salieri slips into a
kind of waking wet dream. There are four sex scenes-- five if you count Ricky Martinez's audition solo-- but when the closing credits start to roll, you may feel you've barely seen one fully realized sequence.
The scenes being shot have minimal correspondence to
La Traviata, although the opera's score seldom loosens its grip on the soundtrack. The first sex episode is a garishly lit, evidently imaginary stagehands' threesome that could have been enacted by inflatable
dolls. Max Veneziano, star of Kristen Bjorn's Men Amongst the
Ruins, is thrown away on a perfunctory sequence in a hotel dining room; newcomer Martinez has a not-bad but misshapen segment with Matthias Vannelli. Only the daydreamed encounter between Salieri and
Byazrov comes fully to life. This finale is followed by a behind-the-scenes featurette that sheds no light on anything, but is at least short.
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