Don't Do It for Love.

What is it about S/M that brings out the best in some filmmakers? Last year Kirby Dick hit the nail's head with Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Super Masochist. This year openly lesbian German director Monika Treut scores a bull's-eye with Didn't Do It for Love, an entertaining portrait of dominatrix Eva Norvind. The Norwegian-born daughter of an emigre Russian prince, Norvind rocked Mexico in the '60s as a celluloid starlet and an outspoken proponent of birth control. Today, she operates a top-drawer leather dungeon in New York City and counsels sex offenders in prisons. On the road from there to here, she collects an entourage of admirers, including most of Mexico's cognoscenti, Milos Forman, Nancy Friday, Erica Jong, a limbless harmonica player, and a slightly befuddled African-American husband acquired from a personals ad.

Highlights: Eva grills her mother about her permissive upbringing; Eva cautions a client who's into baby fantasies that wetting his diapers will limit his choice of dominatrices; Eva jaywalks Manhattan's Fifth Avenue against a red light. Viva Eva!