Walking the line between art and porn, Maria Beatty's classy bondage film about a 1920s mistress and her subservient maid may be too esoteric for some consumers, but it's a definite change-of-pace from standard "tie up a porn star and whip her" fetish videos.

Shot like a silent-era movie and scored with atonal orchestral music and baleful accordion dirges, The 7 Deadly Sins owes as much to F.W. Murnau as it does to Bruce Seven. The plot, told through title cards, details a decadent society woman enacting each of the deadly sins with her faithful maid. Both players are beautiful, in a non-porn, bohemian way, but the action stays slow and relatively tame. It's more about setting a mood than getting off.

Fetishes represented include some light bondage, floggings, bare-handed spanking, and a little watersports (Mistress pees in a vase full of wilting sunflowers). The period costumes are nice, and the casual decadence suggested by the actors' languid practice of their perversions embodies a brand of decadence that mainstream porn's "dig me, I'm shocking!" vibe never comes close to.

This movie's audience may be limited to the more artsy segment of the bondage crowd, but those types will definitely find a lot to like in The 7 Deadly Sins.