Le pornographe

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')

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.

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.

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.

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.