Angie Rowntree’s Sssh.com “erotica for women” site has been on my radar here at ErosBlog since 2004, when my erstwhile co-blogger Aphrodite discovered it and mentioned it warmly on several occasions. Recently Angie asked me to take a look at her newest movie, which is a 35-minute “featurette” called Gone: A Story Of Love And Courage that’s also a moving and affecting erotic musing on the role sex plays in grief and loss.

That may sound like a bummer, but it’s really not. Gone is an authentically erotic movie, but more than that, it is real cinema, a film that engages your viewing attention with story and character even more than with the sex. The woman at the heart of the film (Rebecca, played by Madeline Blue) is strong and sympathetic; the first words we hear from her are:

“They say that it is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. Well, I don’t know who they think they are, but I say that’s bullshit.”

If normalization of kink matters to you, you’ll grin at another of Rebecca’s narrations early in the movie:

“We married right out of college, and bought a house. It was perfect. A white picket fence, surrounded by trees, a dungeon in the basement. We were living the real American Dream, we joked.”

I very much liked how the BDSM in their relationship is shown to be a low-key element of their sex life together, rather than an over-fetishized definition of their relationship. If you’re not too keen on BDSM, don’t worry; this is the kind of “movie BDSM” in which the riding crop is on screen for sixteen seconds caressing her naked body before it slaps her, softly, just twice.

Although we don’t learn until the end of the movie precisely what has become of Rebecca’s husband and of her marriage, the bulk of the action takes place in her mind, as she remembers her husband and struggles with the fact that he’s, ah, gone. There’s nice use of music throughout, and sometimes it’s rather clever. For instance, in a sequence where Rebecca and her husband are making out on the bed watching the New Years Eve ball drop, we can hear drunken revelers singing Auld Lang Syne on the unseen television. As the scene shifts in her mind from the mundane (clothes on, fast food boxes in the bed) to the idealized (fully naked, better lighting, clutter of daily life no longer visible), the sound of the rough TV singing fades and is replaced by an unaccompanied female vocalist singing Auld Lang Syne in a haunting ethereal voice, reminding us that these are literally scenes from “days gone by”.

It’s an emotionally compelling movie, and if it’s porn for women, it works for men too. Or at least it works for me. What’s more, there are nice visual details throughout. For instance, in a very hot closeup blowjob scene near the end of the movie, Madeline Blue’s oral work is complimented by the visual of a pretty blue amethyst or sapphire pendent, bouncing fetchingly off her chest as she bobs up and down:

As far as I know, the Gone movie/featurette is only available for viewing to members of Sssh.com. You can see a trailer here.

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