Laure

I've been strangely attracted to this film since I saw it on Showtime sometime in the early 80's. I say strangely because it is rather a ludicrous bit of soft-core fluff, a genre I'm not particularly interested in. The dialogue is pompously and nonsensically philosophical (making sense, no doubt, only to it's Franco-Italian producers)and the plot completely extraneous. What it does achieve is a wonderfully hypnotic and thoroughly pleasant mood. The scenery (the beautiful Philippines), soft-focus nudity and wonderful score all contribute to a strange and extremely watchable exercise in a sort of film making seldom seen today. It is truly one of my great "guilty pleasures". I was fortunate enough to find it on an old laserdisc and have watched it more times than I think is healthy. A worthwhile moodpiece.

Laure (1976)

** (out of 4)

Co-director and co-writer Emmanuelle Arsan is the one and only Emmanuelle who would write the "autobiography", which would then be turned into a massive hit by Just Jaeckin and be "reworked" so many times over the years that most people will forget that the story wasn't originally meant to tackle perverts in rain coats. This "serious" tale has the beautiful Annie Belle playing Laure, a young woman who goes around the Philippines on a anthropological expedition to find a lost tribe. Her boyfriend (Al Cliver) wants her to be "free" so he recommends she have sex with every man and woman that she can. Also known as FOREVER EMMANUELLE, this is yet another sexploitation film that features non-stop sex and nudity but at the same time after the first few scenes you can't help but get bored. This movie here is a complete bore from pretty much start to finish because there's nothing ever going on that makes any sense nor does anything happen to make you feel as if you're using your time for a good thing. This movie is so incredibly pointless that after the first thirty-minutes or so you begin to wonder why you're wasting so much time with so many movies like this. Joe D'Amato would end up making countless Emanuelle films and the majority of them were bad but at least they had some sort of exploitation going for them. When the group enters the jungle to locate the tribes nothing happens except it gives Laure more people to sleep with. At least D'Amato would have had some people either eaten or killed. There's no question that Belle is a beautiful woman so seeing her naked and in countless sex scenes is going to be the main draw. Cliver is always fun to watch even when he sleepwalks through a part as he does here but that might be unfair to say since whoever is dubbing him does such a poor job. The sex scenes are never very erotic and the dumbest sequence has to come when a transvestite picks Belle and Cliver up in his/her helicopter and an orgy breaks out in the front seat. The film runs 91-minutes and if you want nothing but nudity then this might work for you but if you demand at least a somewhat interesting plot then you're going to be sitting through some pretty boring stuff that never adds up to much. As to who really directed this thing is still up in the air but Arsan gets credit for it and if she was the director then it certainly wasn't her field as she never brings the material to life and things just come off rather cold and bland.

Despite some really scenic locations in the orient and some sporadically energetic music by Franco Micalizzi, this film doesn't quite reach the level of Joe D'Amato's similar efforts while staying just about as trashy. The author of the original book "Emmanuelle: The Joys of a Woman", Emmanuelle Arsan, directed and had a smallish role in this film, which mostly pornographically showcases a very young Annie Belle as she gets in a variety of oddball sexual situations. Her boyfriend, played by ZOMBIE's Al Cliver actually approves of her sleeping around and even persuades her to continue her practices even after the two of them are married! Orso Maria Guerrini drops by as a professor who is oh so usually married simultaneously to two women, one of whom is played by Arsan herself. Despite beginning promisingly and having a few hilarious lines of dialog like "can you see me with the naked eye?" ... "I can see you better naked!", the film shambles along plotlessly up until the less-than-spectacular finale. Much like D'Amato's EMANUELLE AND THE LAST CANNIBALS, the main characters are all in search of some lost tribe, but don't get your hopes up, there's no violence at all in this film, and not much sex either for that matter. Just a lot of nudity and silly dialog. I couldn't help but find some appreciation for this little film, if only for the completely cornball logic the film goes by.

I finally saw LAURE and I have to say that I equally enjoyed it and was dismayed by it. What's great about it is the atmosphere, the music, the location, the cinematography and the beautiful cast. The story is non-existent for sure but with these movies it doesn't really matter. The pace in languid and the settings are exotic. The film has a lot going for it. Unfortunately, it also has a few things going against it. The first thing is that the gorgeous Annie Belle and the handsome Al Cliver have no chemistry whatsoever. Because the two are playing a couple and are on screen for almost the entire length of the film the lack of chemistry between the two is a definite liability. According to IMDb, Al and Annie were a real couple when they filmed this movie. They sure kept their attraction to each other from showing on screen.

The other problem with LAURE is that some sex scenes are just ineffective or even ridiculous. There's one sex scene that stands out as one of the silliest I've ever seen in any soft porn flick: our young blonde couple are picked-up by a helicopter pilot who happens to be a cross-dresser! The pilot flies over the city to pick up his girlfriend (!) and they have an orgy of sorts in the helicopter, in mid-air. And Al Cliver is filming all of this with his 16mm camera! I kid you not. Ridiculous. We later see that 16mm footage being edited on a moviola. While the footage rolls, Al and Annie start making out. This scene is actually good but the footage on the screen behind them was at times too much. Watching the footage of the cross-dresser getting it on with his bimbo while piloting the helicopter almost had me rolling on the floor laughing out loud. Is this supposed to be erotic or believable in any way? The last thing I want to see is a woman pleasuring a man in drag, certainly when the man in drag makes for such an ugly woman, while piloting a helicopter, no less. Al and Annie getting it on was cool as was the music during the entire scene. I just wish the footage on the editing screen wasn't so silly.

Speaking of drag, another dull plot point in LAURE which really drags the movie to a crawl are all those moments with the great Orso Maria Guerrini and his two wives. A married threesome is an interesting idea but it hardly registers here as hot or even interesting. The two women are sorta dull and we rarely see the three having sex. In fact, Orso keeps his clothes on for almost the entire film, even when he's with Annie Belle. This is another minor complaint about LAURE: there's nudity but it's not as much as other films of the same era. It just needed more skin to punch it up.

Except for those minor complaints and the drag queen moments, LAURE is actually very watchable. I love these kind of softcore films from the 1970s when the attention was set on mood and atmosphere, not the crude stuff we see today.

p.s.: make sure to watch Emanuelle in Egypt, which stars Annie & Al but also another famous screen couple, Laura Gemser and Gabriele Tinti. The music in that movie is also great.

This is a rather bizarre movie in that it was co-directed by the real-life Emanuelle Arsan, who wrote the influential "autobiographical" novel "Emmanuelle" on which Just Jaeckin's even more influential French film "Emmanuelle" was based. The other director, however, is the primo Italian trashmeister Ovidio Assontis, who was responsible for "The Exorcist" rip-off "Beyond the Door" and the "Jaws" rip-off "Tentacles". Here he's basically ripping off Jaeckin's "Emmanuelle" in collaboration with the original female author. The strange result of all this is a film that is as allegedly arty and laughably pretentious as the "official" French "Emmanuelle" series, but every bit as low-rent and derivative as the many Italian rip-offs of that same series (although, unfortunately, it's not nearly as entertainingly sleazy as the Joe D'Amato "Black Emanuelle" films).

The movie concerns a mini-skirt clad, underwear-averse young woman, "Laure" (Annie Belle), who is traipsing about the Filipines on some half-ass anthropological expedition to find a lost native tribe. (If this were a d'Amato film the tribe would turn out to be cannibals and eat everybody, but don't get your hopes up here). She is encouraged by her photographer boyfriend (Al Cliver)to have sex with anybody and everybody (older men, women, local natives, and even at point a transvestite helicopter pilot!) usually while he films the encounter.

Belle was a very pretty French girl with a fantastic body, who always looked incredibly sexy despite the bleach-blonde, crew-cut Annie Lennox hair-do she always wore. She was starring in, and sometimes even writing, movies like this from the time she was barely 18 years old (She also appeared in Jean Rollin's "Lips of Blood", Masimo Dallamano's "End of Innocence", Ruggiero Deodato's "House by by the Edge of the Park", and with Laura "Black Emanuelle" Gemser in "Velluto Nero"). Emanuelle Arsan herself also appears in the movie and she too has a plethora of nude sex scenes. (Strangely, she actually looks a lot more like the "Black Emanuelle" Laura Gemser than the official "Emmanuelle" Sylvia Kristel). The real problem though, as others have said, is the lame-brain plot of this movie which is pretty boring and really adds nothing at all to the eroticism.

I guess I'd recommend this to my fellow 1970's "Emmanuelle" completists. But while it's not terrible, it's not that great either.