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Masters and Slaves, Part 1: Opposite Attractions
Rating: 4 Stars
Produced, written, and directed by Bob Wingate. Photographed and edited by Michael Clift. Starring Jason Branch, Steve Ross, Aaron Tanner, and Jay Ross.
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This unexpected marvel from Bound & Gagged Videos has a keener feeling for Manhattan's nighttime ambiance than any other New York-based porn production in recent memory. (This is not to say it has a sense of New York geography. Walking from The Works, a bar on Columbus Avenue at West 81st Street, to an apartment on West 86th, two characters cross Central Park.) Michael Clift's superb videography and editing give long passages of Masters and Slaves the texture of a theatrical film. The cast is small, but unrelentingly hot.

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Jason Branch and Steve Ross, offscreen partners who appeared less effectively in the recent, ludicrous Homo Erectus, make a fiery, glamorous pair. Elegantly turned out in opening-night formal regalia, they spot each other as the Metropolitan Opera crowd pours out into Lincoln Center after a performance. They connect and wind up at Branch's apartment, where their sex begins tamely, then gets rougher as it progresses. Ross invites Branch out to his place in Westchester, where he has an elaborately equipped basement playroom. Both men are dedicated tops who keep slave boys at home; their sexual encounters are a series of negotiations around their customary sex roles.

In Westchester, Ross shares his driver and sex slave (Aaron Tanner) with Branch. After a few rounds of bondage play, Tanner is locked into a black leather mummy suit and hung on a rack while the two masters go on having sex one-on-one. Later, when Branch brings his personal slave (Jay Ross) out to Westchester, both bottoms are gagged, bound face to face with a weighted rope connecting their genitals, flogged, then placed in a cage. Left alone, they make love­ and reveal that they're an estranged couple with sexual issues of their own. Presumably, this erotic quadrangle will assume its final shape in Masters and Slaves, Part 2.