Paris Pigalle Boulevard du Vice

Paris PIGALLE, released on DVD in America as Paris PICKUPS, is an adequate introduction to the French goth porn star Ovidie, who earns her top billing with three sex scenes.

With her trademark multi-facial piercings, she is well-cast as a street whore working near the Place Pigalle. Her love affair with well-hung young Tristan is the main thrust of the non-story, with plot and dialog kept to a bare minimum in this wall-to-wall sex production of Marc Dorcel.

American pornographer Stuart Canterbury took a flyer at making a French porn video here (a la Paul Thomas's recent foray into the same territory with his one-shot 8 MASSEUSES), but the result has no American character whatsoever, strictly resembling assembly line Euro porn.

An almost-triangle develops when Tristan also goes to bed with lovely Nomi, my favorite star, here sporting long blonde hair for a change. But since Ovidie has kept her day job, and is routinely sleeping with other johns, not much comes of it.

MINOR SPOILER:

I was thrilled at the sort of happy ending, when Nomi actually gets the guy (Tristan). Nomi is the Mariangela Melato of porn, and it was a treat to see her again in action.

Film oversells the usual Dorcel "Safe Sex" pitch, which came to a head (so to speak) when Ovidie actually insisted on putting a rubber on Tristan before completing his in-progress blow job. It makes no sense cinematically or from a safe sex point of view either, but who am I to tell Monsieur Dorcel how to run his video porn business? Sophie Evans, familiar to fans from starring in literally hundreds of American sex videos, has an effective scene with two other beauties servicing three johns at once. Dorcel regular Horst Baron gets the b&d treatment from a lovely Black girl.

A subplot involving a bald gangster type muscling in (protection racket?) on the equally bald small businessman running a Pigalle dive goes nowhere. Much of the video's running time is eaten up by footage of live sex acts at his bar/nightclub, featuring a pretty girl masturbating, or a lesbian sex demo, or even a boy/girl tryst, of course featuring condoms as usual.

Sights of Paris on view are routinely photographed, as this is not one of Dorcel's super-productions.