Book of Love – Lydia Steele, Jonathan Bennett

A good book has the power to transport the reader through time and space, to explore fantasy, history, and reality in limitless ways. A good filmmaker uses his chosen medium to accomplish similar feat, inviting the viewer into the world he creates on the screen. In his latest film for SexArt, director Andrej Lupin uses a book to set up the slice of romantic life explored in “Book of Love.” The scene? A bedroom. Lydia Steele is engrossed by the book in her hands, intent, engaged, and lost in the story she’s reading. Jonathan Bennett enters, quietly. He doesn’t want to disturb his lover, but he does have something more than reading a good book in mind. He teases her, he flirts, and even as she reads on, he begins to make love to her. Slowly, incrementally, Victoria’s attention turns from the book in her hands to Lee’s head between her thighs. The heat is building. The book is closed, the dance of love begins in earnest. The intimacy of this erotic encounter, the privacy of the room, the warmth of the morning sun shining in the adjacent hallway, the sounds of ecstasy and delight — all these things are rendered on the screen with a beautiful, nearly palpable realism. Spoiler alert: “Book of Love” contains more than one happy ending!