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from www.torontosun.com – The story of a young Montreal woman who moves to L.A. and contracts HIV on ostensibly her first porn shoot, the documentary Inside Lara Roxx holds the ultimately false promise of surprise and revelation.
Unless you’re shocked to learn that the porn world is sleazy and that the Maury Povich show is scripted and staged, surprises are not on offer.
But Inside Lara Roxx is effective as a glimpse into the complicated reality that the multi-billion-dollar pornography industry presents, and a useful reminder that media sensations are a poor substitute for insight.
The prelude is a 2004 HIV outbreak, in which three porn actresses — including Roxx — contracted the virus from male performer Darren James. The result was a spectacular media splash, replete with sensationalism, moral condemnation and as much flesh as could be flashed on primetime news.
That a bottom-feeding industry involving thousands of sex workers could not produce even a score of HIV positives over the years seems counterintuitive.
Nonetheless, that 2004 outbreak happened. And after media noise (during which Roxx apparently charged money for interviews, including the one on Maury) director Mia Donovan is there to pick up Lara’s pieces.
Over five years of piecemeal interviews, we get, not so much an indictment of the porn industry, but a disjointed portrait of a young woman with lifelong issues.
When we meet her, she’s in a Montreal psychiatric ward (we learn later that she has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder). It’s one of a handful of scenes of Lara in hospital, only one of which is related to AIDS. Her pre-L.A. life story as a runaway and stripper seems all too familiar.
The central gimmick in Donovan’s movie is to take Lara back to L.A. and trace her steps (with a side-trip to the porn industry’s biggest annual convention in Las Vegas). There, we meet a lot of scuzzy guys who disingenuously refer to their “girls” as family. We meet a chubby, bearded former porn actor who calls himself Papa Bear, who festoons his office with teddy bears, but shows his fangs when he says Lara should blame herself and not the porn industry.
We meet Sharon Mitchell, a well-spoken porn-actress-turned-doctor who started a clinic for sex workers and was the woman who gave Lara her diagnosis.
The industry’s apathy is underscored by the fact that Mitchell’s clinic has since closed, and by the Vegas visit, in which Roxx ran a safe-sex-awareness booth that the “delegates” pointedly avoid. At one point, she pigeonholes Ron Jeremy, who says a few words about safe sex and then cracks jokes about the subject clearing the room.
The circus part of the movie over, Lara is back in Quebec, bouncing between illnesses, crack addiction and horrible men. Donovan tries hard to make Inside Lara Roxx into a round-holed redemption story, but the subject insists on being a square peg.
In the end, the movie doesn’t succeed in taking us “inside” its subject’s psyche. But it does leave us with some suspicions — that she was more streetwise when she went to L.A. than she lets on, that (HIV aside) she had bigger problems than porn.
And, just maybe, she manipulated her doc-biographer as much as anyone else in her life.
*See the clip: www.torontosun.com/2012/02/02/porn-doc-roxx-gets-real