Le pornographe

Le Pornographe can be termed as a decent film directed by Bertrand Bonello as it does not shock any viewer who has self conceived notions about the film's title.It is one of those typical French films in which characters ramble on various life affirming themes.This is the reason why the film's title is an absolutely inappropriate misnomer as the word "Le Pornographe" does not do much justice to this film's central themes.Bertrand Bonello has made effective use of his film's principal character,a famous French director of pornographic films Jacques Laurent to conduct an observational study about various human relationships which include a troubled father son relationship,a pallid husband wife relationship.These relationships are so strongly portrayed that the topic as well as scant depiction of pornography is easily sidelined.Although this film features some famous porn stars like HPG,Ovidie etc,it is through actors like Jean Pierre Léaud, Jérémie Renier,Catherine Mouchet and Dominique Blanc that Bertrand Bonello is able to lead his film to its inscrutable conclusion.

Jacques (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is the son of a doctor, born in 1950, who had dedicated his life from 1970 to 1984 to pornographic movies. His wife committed suicide when his son Joseph (Jérémie Rénier) was five, and when he was a teenager, he became aware of the profession of his father and left home. Presently Jacques is broken and has decided to accept the invitation to direct porno movies again. Meanwhile his son, now seventeen years old, decides to approach to him.

This film is so pretentious and boring that irritated me. The story is quite ridiculous, and the antagonistic philosophic behavior of Jacques is funny. A guy who dedicated his life (since twenty years old) to pornography, in the beginning just because he wanted to attract girls for having sex, worked along fourteen years with sex, is not to have an existential middle-age crisis like showed in the plot of this movie. I do not like porno movies and I am not a moralist person, but if I have to see explicit sex, at least lets see with beautiful actresses in erotic situation. I do not know the name of the 'actress' in the explicit scene, but she will certainly be marked for the rest of her career. I do not understand how such a crap was awarded in Cannes. My vote is four.

Title (Brazil): 'O Pornógrafo' ('The Pornographer')

This film marks the first time I saw a penetration scene on a basic cable channel. It's significant, if not technically or artistically amazing.

It was in medium shot, and at first I thought it was more simulated softcore nonsense since the gentleman appeared to be positioned too far away during coitus. Turns out he was just impressively endowed.

'Pornographe' turns in good performances from the actors, especially Leaud. He has the kind of homeopathic presence that made Sarah Polley famous. From a distance, the French national character appears understated, and quite reserved. Contrast that with the classic German, who is full of bluster, extroverted positivity, and usually neat as a pin. The English, finally, appear perpetually drunk and flooding the sidewalk with urine.

The long meditative shots of trees were meant to convey atmosphere, but kind of made me feel like I was waiting at a bus-stop. A minor complaint - it's worth seeing.

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.

In "Le Pornographe" Jean-Pierre Léaud plays Jacques Laurent, an old and famous director of pornographic films in the 1970's and 1980's, who after an absence from filmmaking for many years decides to make his last film projects while trying to reconciliate with his teenage son (Jéremie Renier) who disapproves his father's career. Bertrand Bonello directs a quite controversial material but lost his way while trying to focus the depth of his film on the dramatic side of the story.

Porn is all about the true in front of you and there's no escape from that. At least the sex scenes are performed by the actors, there's no falsity on that. Drama in its highest form only has nuances of reality, it touches reality very closer but it's false, you can see where fiction begins and reality ends. Here's examples of both statements: Action actors (sometimes) depends on the stunt doubles to perform their risky scenes; porn actors don't, they are committed to the sexual acts. Now, the film in question broke the barrier between both medias (dramatic and pornography), made relevant to the story but while it pushed the envelope in a great way in one genre (the porn) it made the other one totally uninteresting, without firmness of purpose and, I really didn't want to say this but, quite boring. This plot on the hands of a Bergman or an Altman (first names that comes to mind in terms of quality in drama) would be fantastic, and they wouldn't use graphic scenes to play their story. P.T. Anderson made something similar and ten times better with his "Boogie Nights". The eroticism was a supporter from the story involving persons behind the porn world.

So, the only interesting thing in the film is the film within the film, the porn film directed by Léaud's character in a very explicit scene (there's two scenes, being the first most shocking for regular viewers of drama films). The way the scenes somehow fit the film was interesting, the reactions of the non-porn actors and all. Towards the end of the film when Jacques is interviewed he says about how he started to make porn movies and here's an interesting question left to us when he talks about pornographic films being an art. In which category you would put a film like "Le Pornographe": in porn or drama? It plays with our heads for a while.

There's no way you can relate with this director living a crisis in his life neither his rebel son preaching a silent revolution to change things on the country with his colleagues; everything they do is so disconnected, a bad presentation of facts, a weak and confusing narrative that doesn't know how to hold the audience's attention (except for the already mentioned film within the film). In short, the drama is fake and boring while the sex is real and interesting. It's a real disappointment that Jean-Pierre Léaud was part of this film with one of his weakest performances (he gets better in the final moments) in an almost meaningless film. Very weak film, watch it only out of curiosity and nothing more. 5/10