Felicity

This kooky and kool soft core skin flick I remember seeing as a teenager on the old Private Screenings channel. It's the kickaxe story of a sweet, fresh young thing's sexual awakening in the mysterious Orient. I fell head over heels in love and lust with the main actress Glory Annen in this film when I first saw it. She only did a few films besides this, "Spaced Out", "Alien Prey" etc...but this was definitely her crowning achievement. I guess she stopped acting cos I haven't seen her in anything in years. It's too bad, cos she was so absolutely gorgeous! She wasn't your typically busty, perfect looking Hollywood bimbo, but that's what I liked about her! Who wants to like the girls that everyone likes? Not me! You can keep Pamela Anderson Lee, I like women that look like women, not Barbie dolls. I'll take Glory any day of the week!

Although it's rarely acknowledged, there are probably few films in history that were as influential as the 1974 softcore French classic "Emmanuelle". Besides the truly countless number of films with the word "Emmanuelle" (or the less legally-actionable variation "Emanuelle") in the title, there were any number of others that borrowed the basic plot of a young woman traveling to the Orient and/or having a sexual awakening. There was, for instance, the German film "Vanessa" with Olivia Pascal, the British film "Emily" with Koo Stark, the French-Italian films "Laure" and "End of Innocence" both with Annie Bell. And there was this Australian film with English actress Glory Annen.

Like "Vanessa", "End of Innocence", and a few others this features a slightly younger female character than the original "Emmanuelle", which allows it to start out in a girls' boarding school with a lot of hot showers and hot lesbian action. But the virginal "Felicity" (Annen) eventually finds her way to Hong Kong. She stays at first with a friend and her lover,and loses her virginity to an Aussie with a walrus moustache after one of her hosts' parties. After that "Felicity" meets a local,"Me Ling" (Joni Flynn),and embarks on an erotic tour of Hong Kong, having more anonymous sex on a Chinese junk. She then falls in love with another, nicer Aussie guy, but his job and the couple's mutual infidelities threaten to derail the relationship.

On the plus side, this movie has very good productions values and the girls--Annen,Flynn, etc.--are all very attractive. The movie pretty shamelessly steals from the "Emmanuelle" series in several places--it borrows the massage parlor scene from "Emmanuelle 2" and the improbable sex on a commercial airplane scene from the original "Emmanuelle". It's also more literary than your usual sex film, referencing not only the original novel "Emmanuelle", but other erotic classics of the 70's like "Histoire de O" and "Fear of Flying" (all of which "Felicity" is reading at some point). "Felicity" is generally odd character. She starts out as the world's horniest female virgin (witness her reading list), and remains a contradiction to the end, complaining about the hedonism of a Hong Kong bar they visit one minute, then having "zipless" sex with the bartender in the back room the next. But that's the 70's for you I guess. The love story is a little annoying and the theme song will stay in your head like a bad flu virus. All in all though, this is a pretty OK Aussie knock-off of "Emmanuelle".

If Merchant Ivory had set out to make a Russ Meyer's style film, this would be the result. The movie manages to walk a tightrope between it's brainless-ness, it's soft core porn, it's paper thin "plot" and somehow through it all doesn't come off as exactly sleazy. Calling it "sensual" feels wrong and somehow lends it more credibility than it probably deserves but all the same it's not exactly crass either. A weird little balancing act that pays off by being, if not great, than something better than the filmmaker's intended. Not good, not bad, just is.

I enjoyed this mostly - not for the sex scenes which were par for the course, but as a 70s time capsule. I liked the protagonist, Felicity- she was pretty but not gorgeous, naive but sexy too. The story was a bit silly but I enjoyed the scenes in Hong Kong, especially the contrast between the rich and touristy areas and the poor people living on the water. I imagine too that girls and women would have been treated in ways portrayed here in the late 1970s (I was a child then). In all, it was a decent watch, mainly as a kind of snapshot of those days - I also liked the clothes! I gave a reasonable 6 stars out of 10.

I first saw this film back in the eighties and I still consider it to be the most erotic film ever made. Filmed on location, production values are high. Our eponymous heroine travels from her convent school, filmed at the artists' community at Montsalvat, Eltham, then Healesville train station, Victoria, in Australia to stay with her aunt in Hong Kong. There she meets the people who awaken her latent sexuality. All the female actors are incredibly gorgeous in a natural girl-next-door sort of way, especially Glory Annen who plays the lead. She spends a fair amount of time bathing and showering so the director certainly knew his job. Felicity offers a refreshing naturalness compared to the pumped up plasticity of modern erotica. Thoroughly recommended - naturally.