Le pornographe

When I see the morally degrading dreck which passes for mass entertainment these days, it is astonishing that authority in Britain chooses to busy itself policing the rational pleasures of an entirely respectable section of the film-viewing public! I really think that the often abysmally low tastes of the general cinema-going and video - buying public would be a much more worthwhile subject for active disapproval.

It really is as if authority considers the mindless dissipations of the many to be less threatening to society than the critical exercise, amongst relatively few, of the individual's 'organ of thought': Indeed, I really think that it must be the naked expression of an individual brain, unrestrained by any officially-approved views, which gives rise to the greatest offence. I think this is the common and accepted belief of those who see themselves as the guardians of public morality. The brain is the organ which really disgusts them. The expression of thought threatens their whole perverted moral order with irreducible truth.

No bureaucrat can afford to admit first principles into his dishonest elaboration of power. The primaeval statements of raw sex can - and obviously have! - in such circumstances been used to subvert the chilly formulae of social control. It is interesting how the old counter-culture director [Leaud] is subverted in the crucial scene by the assistant director who has been foisted on him for commercial reasons: This latter is truly the shadow of a censor who only approves of mindlessness. This shadow-director unilaterally executes the commercial, therefore political, act of censoring the nominal director's more considered envisioning of the scene. He is the authentic commissar of a thought-police whose home-grown KGB is the BBFC.

This unholy partnership of literally 'filthy lucre' and the mind-control which government has become - obviously more so here than in France - was obviously not something that could be exposed to public view!

And yet, of course, the moral nakedness of the Public Censor's disgusting cavortings makes even those acts of sex which may be misdirected seem positively wholesome. It is the unhealthy obsessions of the moral fanatic which are offensive. Unlike Jacques - the rather Doinel-ish permanent adolescent - there is no hope in the censor's heart that the base material of humanity can be redeemed.

The Censor is obviously just another aspect of the hatred and suspicion which those who can neither understand nor deal naturally with humanity express in order to control it. And in order to control humanity, bureacracies arise to diminish it by the proscription of its primaeval rights. Being deprived of the thoughts arising in the face of the porn-star Ovidie at the moment of the first important statement of humanity in this drama, we are being deliberately deprived of the sense of decency which only comes when the consequences of free-will are tolerated . Outraged decency is the prerogative of every free individual, after all, and not the sinecure of a government official!

Mere 'public decency' is the enemy of the living truth of individual action. The compromising of Jacques's more inward and moral scenario - effectively an attack on two fronts, in Britain! - by a blatantly commercial motivation reveals him as the revolutionary he failed to become, back in the cultural ferment of the '60's.

Our Censor has sent a very powerful signal to Britain: There are thoughts which you will not be permitted to entertain. Public indecencies of every kind are fine, just so long as these are no more than the mindless behaviour of a docile species of cattle.

The thing that illegitimate authority - I mean, the kind that does not understand that it governs merely on sufferance - cannot allow is the generation of ideas by the free association of human impulses!

Such inhuman power is the enemy of the human soul. It conceives as its first duty the neutering of culture. It intends that we shall not even reach a state of intelligent adolescence. It means to keep us 'in loco parentis' in perpetuity. This paternalism is triumphant and out of control in Britain. It is a life-denying perversion of responsible authority, that wants to arrest all human growth, arrogating to itself the monopoly of adulthood in a perennially childish world. One is grateful for a film from a freer and more grown-up country that has made this clear, not so much despite, but because of the Censor's profoundly immoral intervention in its distribution.

Jacques (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is more like a philosopher in this movie by Bertrand Bonello than a director of a pornographic movie. He looks back at his life and explores the sense of his existence. It is not clear how he lives when he makes his last movie after some years of interruption and how he sees his future but he takes some comfort in the presence of his son. This movie is very sober and in fact it is pessimistic because it does not give us an answer about the meaning of the life of the main character Jacques. Is he sad about his career as a maker of pornographic movies or is he proud of his work?

This film , as one previous reviewer has mentioned, is pretentious and boring. The sex scenes are gratuitous and add nothing to the narrative. This film has less of a reason to depict graphic sex than DEEP THROAT did yet it manages to work up to a senseless and oddly boring sexually graphic moment and with even worst actors (imagine that!)than that silly camp film.

It is fitting that at the turn of the century sex would be depicted as a silent dirty act by a tired old French director. He blames youth for the impotence in this bogus film and that is not fair. This movie lives in a vacuum of it's own making.

The worst of porn was never this bad. As the ads for the French Classic EMMANUELLE once stated, "x was never like this." The BBFC was right! Take ten second out and you have the impotent tragedy this film really is; Leave them in and you have exploitation of the public under false pretences. The director should apologise to us for subjecting us to this . We expect more out of French Cinema.

We pray the United States Supreme Court is soon peopled by non-Puritans who will believe the First Amendment guarantees Americans the right to produce and watch what pleases them. The current federal court system is full of Reagan-era morons who do not believe we as a people have enough sense to decide for ourselves what we see on television and at the movies.

Having lived through the cultural revolution of the 1960's, I would have hoped to see by now more open minds on the bench and in the federal Executive Branch. Instead, we have had the same draconian moral arbiters we've had since the 1950's. For instance, instead of moving forward toward freedom from censorship, we have to deal with the likes of Bush's Federal Communications Commission chairman Michael Powell (son of "there can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons" Colin Powell), whose obsession with Janet Jackson's breast drove him to seek higher FCC fines to punish radio and television stations and networks who have the temerity to broadcast words and images which violate his poor Baptist ears.

It's truly riling when a film reeking of self importance and supposed deep meaning is so obviously a total fake. There may have once been French films in which great existential truths were told with a particularly somber French seriousness. This must have made a lasting impression on many a future director who dreamed of one day putting some of their own deep truths on screen. This led to too many pretentious French films which really have little if anything of importance to say, other than some empty platitudes in the guise of a intellectualism. These films tend to give you the feeling of inadequacy. While others around are imbibing the pearls of wisdom you may sit dumbfounded wondering what it's all about. Don't be fooled for a minute by this hollow pretense.

"Le Pornographe" is a prime example. It's a total bluff and in cinematic terms a complete mess. Jean-Pierre Leaud trades off his legendary younger days as Truffaut's alter ego. This may lend a certain weight to the character, but again it's a mere cloak for the nothingness beneath. The actors are constantly brooding, with a vacant expressionless stare. This is not meaningful as director Bonello would want us to believe, it's simple a façade. Jeremie Renier, one of the more promising young French actors is wasted in this vacuous exercise.

You might think a statement would be made about the nature of pornography, a subject begging out for a truly insightful cinematic investigation. But even that is skirted. What remains is an extremely irritating and decidedly boring film. Even the inclusion of two hard core (though distantly shot) sex scenes, both totally devoid of any eroticism, fails to inject some life into this abomination.

Fakery of the very worst kind.