Pornotissimo

Serge Korber had an estimable career cranking out big-star comedies and dramas (notably with Annie Girardot) before turning his hand to a series of XXX porn assignments in the mid-'70s, when this newly legal art form was all the rage. Unlike other people in such a transition, he quickly went back to mainstream film & TV assignments after the trend cooled off, without missing a beat.

For that reason I wasn't completely surprised at the competence of PORNOTISSIMO, representing a bit of wheat among the chaff that is '70s Euro Porn. There are scenes, particularly at the beginning of the film, where the acting and direction uncannily fool you into thinking you're watching a real film.

Case in point, is an early scene where the wife of our publisher hero, Josepha, comes to visit his office. The secretary is a bombastic platinum blonde, immediately recognizable from innumerable porn imports (Karine Gambier) but she behaves normally, like a good assistant should. The married couple's conversation is very well-delivered to suggest we might be in a typical French boulevard comedy or even dramatic piece, when suddenly wifey gives him a blow job. The spell is broken, and it's porn time for the duration.

But virtually the entire cast gives decent acting performances, irrelevant perhaps to the film's directive to arouse the viewer, but pleasing nonetheless. A decadent guy whose mansion everyone visits is the catalyst for swapping, orgies and the like, but I didn't feel like I was sitting through just another overlong stag movie for a change.

So without granting Korber too much praise -after all he was capable of doing so much better, at least here we have a filmmaker with integrity, who tries to deliver a well-crafted entertaining package regardless of its modest aspirations and disgraced genre. Most slumming filmmakers take the opposite approach (cf., the Joes: D'Amato & Sarno), slack off entirely and insult the viewer.