Customer Reviews

Cynara [VHS]

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Cynara was my first experience with Lesbian Erotica. I thought I had stumbled on a wonderful genre, and ordered several similar (so I thought) videos for my collection.

After viewing the other videos including Siren, Goodbye Emma Jo, and Et L'Amour, my collection now numbers 1. Compared to Cynara, the others were so inferior it hurt my eyes to watch them.

Cynara has beautiful women, beautiful poetry, beautiful music, the sea, and horses. While it has a few rough edges (cinematography) for the most part, it is done in good taste, a real "ladies" movie. I think my mother would approve.

This film is not about sex or love but of passion and desire. The actresses are thoughtfully paired. You get the feeling that both women are Lesbians, not straight actresses pretending to be attracted to each other.

Melissa Hellman (Byron) is a remarkable beauty. Her eyes, hands, face, hair, and wonderfully sculpted body lend themselves to this period piece (set in 1883)...

I love this film. I have watched it over 200 times & it is still fascinating. Both women are gorgeous. I love seeing a Lesbian film that is not pornographic & has only the women in it. Nicolle Conn has outdone herself. I am in love with Johanna Nemeth.

The music is wonderful.

This movie could have been so much more if time and effort was put into it .. very disapointing.. there were no love scenes worth mentioning .. just two models posing .. there was no story line, not to mention neither one of the charaters said more than 20 words between them ....the movie is only 30 min. or so long ...I dont think I could have stood it much longer . If you must see this movie rent it or get it used somewhere . I enjoyed the end credits better than the movie .

I have no doubt that this film is sincere - there's a little documentary at the end about the making of it, and everybody seems to be having a good time, laughing and joking and all that. Sincerity is great, but it doesn't mean that something created sincerely is any good.

If you ignore the silly 'romantica' label, 'Cynara' is basically lesbian soft-porn. For fifteen minutes two women walk around a variety of olde-worlde settings (with a cod-classical soundtrack which appears to have been composed on a General MIDI synth) looking misty-eyed; for the next fifteen minutes they roll around naked on a bed.

It's shot on video and looks it, there isn't really any acting, and it's roughly on the level of a Penthouse video (with less rude). The 'romantica' label appears to be an attempt to make it seem artier than it is.

Nicole Conn has "outdone herself" on this one? Maybe that's part of the problem. She should stick to documentary work, these movies (Claire of the Moon also) are lacking. She has yet to cast anyone who could "act", I mean really ACT, worth a nickel. The women in this movie were attractive, but they had no chemistry since they were just "models" posing and showed no hint of emotion that seemed real. The sound quality is poor, just like in Claire. There isn't much of a story, this is just a film of period costumes, glances, sexual tension and then "the act" itself. OK, it was sorta hot, but clearly choreographed. The artistry was nice though.

Cynara: Poetry in Motion could do it's self a favour and just keep motioning on out the door and into the trash. I've seen alot of Lesbian movies and I think this would have to be my number one WORST. Just think, you'd have worked a whole hour to pay for this, don't waste your time or money.

"Cynara - Poetry In Motion" is to the consortium of lesbian films what Star Trek (the original series) was to the science fiction genre. Sensual imagery combines with a delicate piano score (worthy of purchase by itself, I might add) to warm the blood and remind the imagination what romance erotica is supposed to be. While this film isn't a full ninety minute feature, the compelled re-watch more than compensates for its short duration. There are three movies every true fan of this genre should own (a series included here): "Cynara - Poetry In Motion" (for the artsy beauty of it all), "Claire Of The Moon" (for the truth to be told) and of course, "The L Word" (because this one has it all.) Next up: The DVD? Here's hoping!

I had never encountered the concept of "Romantica" before but in this video the director has created what is one of the most lyrical visual experiences I've ever had. It is highly erotic, but what makes it so, is that there is a romantic build -- the element that is missing in all the erotica out there. It's beautifully shot and the music is haunting and beautiful. When I discovered there was a CD of the music I ordered it from Wolfe Video in San Jose, CA. Highly Recommend.

I really like this so called ' romantica '. But I do think it could've been better from all the hype it got, I expected a little more somewhat . I do think its great and the characters interacted with one another and unlike the other lesbian oriented movies that looks acted, this one doesn't look it at all ...

Cynara: Poetry in Motion (Nicole Conn, 1996)

I apologize in advance for saying this, because I'm even starting to annoy myself when I do. Every time I review a short film (and I define "short film" as anything that clocks in under sixty minutes), I start the review off by saying that I never review short films. I don't do it because if I did, I'd be even father behind in my reviewing than I already am; I probably watch two short films for every feature (and according to my spreadsheet, as I write this, on January 18, 2010, I have watched fourteen features so far this year). But every once in a while, a short film is so good (or so bad) that I can't help myself. And I end up writing that "I don't normally do this" opening sentence every damn time. Sorry about that. Still, though, I've reviewed a handful, at most, of shorts in the past five years. I have to be really moved. And the most recent short to do it is Nicole Conn's 1996 film Cynara: Poetry in Motion. This is a film that should by every possible right have been inestimably cheesy. Instead, it's possibly the most erotic, and the most romantic, forty minutes I have ever seen on a screen.

The movie takes place in 1883, at Baycliff, a seaside resort in England. Cynara (Johanna Nemeth in her only screen appearance, though she's done some behind-the-scenes work; she was a production designer on Mark Polish's brilliant Northfork) is living there. She's been there for quite a while; the opening monologue is from a letter Cynara wrote to her aunt, expressing her intense boredom. Visually, while this is going on, she's working with clay. It's all very abstract and Merchant-Ivory and blah blah blah, but there's something very yonic (is that a word?) about the clay and the way Cynara's fingers are massaging it. Enter Byron (Growing Up Thirty's Melissa Hellman), the poet, whom the film recasts as female, but masculine; not in the sense of the butch dyke so common in media, but in the sense of lean, muscular, handsome, but still very aware of being a woman. (My apologies if this is as tough to understand while you're reading it as it is for me to try and describe it.) The two are instantly drawn to one another, and the bulk of the film takes place alternately in their fantasies, which are deliciously explicit, and the reality, which is as restrained as you'd expect Victorian society to be; the two of them flirt, and get just to the point where a kiss is about to happen, but propriety stops it from actually happening. My god, it must have been frustrating to live in Victorian times.

The end result, however, is stunning. Conn strikes the perfect balance of explicitness and restraint to bring out both the film's softcore tendencies (what a different world film would be if, say, Radley Metzger had a tenth this much talent, or the Dark Brothers one one-hundredth of Conn's sense of the erotic!) and the tender, searing frustration of everything that's not a dream sequence. Are these two ever actually going to get together? As an amusing side note, the running time of the movie stands as a mute excoriation of the attempt to keep sexual tension running through the two main characters of any long-running TV series (The X-Files, anyone?). No wonder the tension between Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz lasted for about half the first season in Bones. That said, give Conn a big-time network drama with two characters who have a reason for not knocking boots; I have every faith that she could pull it off where so many others have failed.

One way or the other, though, get your hands on a copy of Cynara: Poetry in Motion if you have a romantic bone in your body and if you're not turned off by the explicitness. The movie has a shockingly low IMDB rating (3.9 as of January 18, 2010), but only forty-eight votes. That's hardly a representative sampling, one thinks, and I have a strong suspicion that if the film got more press, a lot more people who might actually like the thing might see it. And thus, I'm once again breaking my rule about not reviewing shorts. See this movie. It manages to be both smart and jaw-droppingly sexy at the same time, and the more supposedly erotic movies I see, the more I understand how rare that combination is. ****