One of the first scenes in Kamikaze Hearts (1986) I couldn’t get enough of. Sharon Mitchell sitting in the back of an open top convertible, driving through San Francisco, as she plays to the camera in her leather jacket and sunglasses. If you didn’t know Sharon Mitchell as an adult film star, in this moment, she comes off as having some type of punk glamour, a star of some kind, definitely a performer. The film continues observing Mitchell, but within a hybrid of fact and fiction, a documentary with fabricated elements, deconstructing this type of stardom, or more specifically a performer who is always “on.”
Presenting itself as a behind-the-scenes look at an adult film set in a nightclub and incorporating Bizet’s Carmen, Kamikaze Hearts is more about the relationship between adult stars Mitchell and Tiga who is also a producer on the film being made. Pornography promises real sex on film, and the documentary’s subject matter might imply that this is what we’ll see as well. But Kamikaze Hearts is more about the low budget atmosphere on an adult movie set, and the personalities in the room – and Mitchell having another camera to perform to.
Mitchell and Tiga’s relationship is defined by its beneficial surface on porn sets – a lesbian couple able to avoid the sleazier men in such productions – and its connection to drug use and heroin, which is discussed obliquely initially and becomes clearer as the film goes on, until it is ultimately the “money shot” itself, the promise of the real through shooting up on camera.
You might guess as you’re watching Kamikaze Hearts that not everything is reality, and that the Carmen inspired porno was a fiction; the metatextual element of fabricating a “real set” in order to depict truths from the perspective of the script’s co-author Tiga and possibly an on-camera counselling session between her and her lover and co-worker Mitchell. Even when the credits roll, there is that sense that everything is a representation and a construction, but there’s a pain and a despair that is very real in the final drug-addled sequence. A fascinating project that was lost to time until a recent restoration and re-release. Available to stream on Kanopy. Recommended.
VHS Tracking 