Fly Me the French Way

Bacchanales Sexuelles begins in a garishly, Jess Franco-ian fashion with a mysterious, fabulously attired exotic blond, Malvina (Britt Anders) making enquiries over the current whereabouts of a journalist in her splendidly sordid-looking office. We later discover that the imperious, Malvina is a nefarious, slave-making, polymorphously perverse pseudo-sorceress! This debased, blackmailing matriarch uses her ensorcelled initiates to furiously scintillate her luridly licentious desires! With a threadbare plot mirroring the flimsy garments these delightful Gallic starlets so blithely discard, director, Michele Gentil (Jean Rollin) proceeds alacritously to the fulsome fleshly frolics that form the sleekly attractive backbone of his daringly illicit romp. Bacchanales Sexuelles gleefully exposes more perfectly formed rumps than the fevered filth of fellow French sensualist the Marquis de Sade!

While 'Bacchanales Sexuelles' is narratively sparse, the playful director's sublimely sensuous skin-flick is far from frugal when it comes to diverting displays of energetically performed, multifarious examples of physically amorous dexterity! Once the breathtakingly beautiful Valerie (Joelle Coeur) has taken up comfortable residence in her absent Cousin's agreeably palatial, handsomely Bohemian apartment, she proceeds with great dispatch to hungrily explore every nubile nook and insatiable cranny the curious Valerie zealously comes across!

There are all too few vintage soft core smut fests that so pleasantly revive both the somnolent spirit and other more corporeal appendages than, Jean Rollin's passionately pulchritudinous exploration of epicurean exotica! Happily, very little is left to the imagination, therefore giving the more avidly skin-seeking celluloid sensualist a ringside seat to some of the moist sublime B-Movie burlesque this silken side of Joseph Sarno! These uniquely edifying visions of Gallic Grindhouse's finely-flanked felines, Joelle Coeur, titillating terror twins, Catherine & Marie-Pierre Castel, and the delightfully elfin Annie 'Lips of Blood' Belle prove deliciously irresistible! The supremely slinky, never less than funky lounge score by groove-master, Rex Hilton is pitch perfect sleazy listening!

There are two ways to approach this movie. If you're looking for a softcore porn knock-off you will no doubt find it very strange, but you probably won't be disappointed. If you're a Jean Rollin fan though you won't find it strange enough, and you probably will be. The problem with this movie is that it is VERY heavily padded with the typical boring, mechanical softcore grinding scenes. It's not that this detracts from the plot--this is a Rollin film after all with the usual deliciously bizarre if completely inconsequential story--but it does take away from the strangely beautiful images and haunting atmosphere that characterize the director's best work. Rollin seemed to realize this and used a pseudonym on the film, even before it was retitled "Fly Me the French Way" (what the hell does that mean, anyway?) and had some pre-credit sequence from what is obviously a completely different movie slapped onto it.

I do have to take exception with some of the previous reviews which claim the women in this movie aren't attractive. So these French actresses need to shave their armpits, they're still preferable to the ridiculously over-sized silicone breasts attached to anorexic American "actresses" who are obviously just punching the clock when they're doing sex scenes. Call me un-American . . .

So-so Jean Rollin sexploitation flick, about a chick (schoolgirl hitchhiker herself, Joëlle Coeur) who house sits her cousin's apartment, has lesbian sex while she's there, gets involved in kidnappings, and must rescue her lesbian lover from a sex cult.

The apartment is quite nice looking, so is Joëlle, but overall the film doesn't have the same hauntingly beautiful visuals that I've come to enjoy so much from Rollin. It is not at all up to some of Rollin's other work: no vampires, no zombies, less atmospherics, and sparse dialogue filling up the overlong run time. What we're left with is no different than most other soft core porn/ horror titles from the 1970s.

Film's opening title scene is fun, a slightly Dada-influenced sequence, culminating with a cool, old house (think The Addams Family's mansion) but what the hell that has to do with the rest of the film, I cannot figure. And why do rat caricatures suddenly appear?

Pay close attention when Joelle first walks into the apartment, a poster for Rollin's earlier Vampire Nue is visible on the wall.

Writer/director Jean Rollin departs from his vampire and zombie movies to give us some soft-core porn with very little story. In fact, the most amazing thing about this film was that it had three writers. There was so little dialog, that the script could have been written on the back of an envelope.

But, we are not here to see a fancy story, we are here to see Joëlle Coeur, who I first discovered in Schoolgirl Hitchhikers. And, we do get to see Coeur - all of her, every inch, nothing left to the imagination, with her girlfriend, with a guy, with the guy and another girl in the tub, covered with jam, covered with soap, Oh My god! And it is not just Coeur we see, but her girlfriend Sophie (Marie-France Morel), the high priestess Malvina (Brigitte De Borghese), Jenny (Agnès Lemercier), and Brigette (Annie Belle). There were many more at the cast party at the end, but they are not important.

If you are looking for some campy fun in the vein of the 70s grindhouse action, this is the way the French do it. Oh mon dieu!

Bacchanales sexuelles (1974)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Softcore sexploitation film from France has a young girl named Valerie (Joelle Coeur) watching her cousin's home for six months while he is away on a trip. The first night there she gets bored so she invites her girlfriend Sophie (Mari-France Morel) over for some lesbian sex but in the middle of the night Sophie is kidnapped and taken away by a sex crazed cult. There's really not much of a story here, although, to be honest, not many of the director's films feature any type of story. It's rather strange seeing Rollin do a film like this that features the normal lesbian sex without any vampires but later in his career he would start doing hardcore porn but I haven't watched any of those films yet. The biggest problem is that this movie is simply here to show off nudity, which is does quite a bit with the beautiful French actresses but sadly the film runs 101-minutes, which is about thirty-minutes too long. It's funny but the American release cut thirty-minutes worth of footage but the Synapse DVD is the uncut French version. The first lesbian scene is pretty hot but everything goes downhill after this. The story really doesn't make too much sense and even the sex scenes grow tiresome after a while.