Mieux vaut faire l'amour

This period sex comedy is very tame by today's standards, actually even by, say, 1969's standards. When the film was made, Europe just entered the period in which brief glimpses of female nudity (breasts and bunms) became acceptable in feature films. The film even mocks the censorship restrictions by pulling a (painted) curtain whenever a couple is going into clinch, and claiming that it's a Napoleonic censor, i.e. contemporary to the story. I reckon this was meant as a thinly disguised deliberate insult to the 1960s censor.

The film makes a half-hearted attempt at combining sex with romance; the actors in the romantic roles apparently did not have the strength to carry the film and so the romantic tanglings were kept short. On the comedy side, the film isn't really a winner either. The writing seems outdated, more like a 1950s comedy. Some very good comedy actors such as Gunter Philipp and Oskar Sima are shamefully under-used and appear somewhat uneasy with the genre shift. Only Jacques Herlin is a real treat.

The sequels to this film were slightly better (apart from the final film of the series which is awful). They managed to create a more convincing combination of the comedy with the sexual shenanigans by getting baudy while being helped with less restrictive censorship.