Marc Dorcel hooked up with no less than cult director Jean Rollin 20 years earlier to shoot "Mathilda's Perfume", and he returns to the story as a showcase for a talented new actress Manon Martin in "Manon's Perfume". This time around Pascal Lucas and house director Herve Bodilis collaborated on the shoot, with fine results.
Much of the success is due to the exuberant and quite natural performance of Manon in a dual role: she briefly plays the hero's wife Karen, who is killed (in a motorcycle accident off-screen) in the second reel. After grieving for six months hubby Pascal Saint James gets back on the scene and is struck at a nightclub by the young Manon's resemblance to his late wife. It isn't the scent of these women, but rather facial lookalike action. The story does feature a special talisman, a necklace both women wear, so the title of the movie should have been Le Collier de Manon.
Unlike many recent Dorcel efforts, this feature has a continuous storyline and actual characterizations, as opposed to the usual pantomime between sex acts. Pascal is into BDSM and has a need to dominate Manon, which she submissively agrees to at every turn (he's polite enough to ask and give her a choice, over and over, as he escalates the sex games). He's mainly a voyeur and part of the film's force comes from the fact that in a Clintonian sense he doesn't have actual sex with this woman, merely forcing her to hump many other people along the way for his personal delight.
Other key roles are filled by Cecilia de Lys as a beautiful whore who (in a stylishly pink-lit scene) tries to service Pascal, but their sex is cut short by his odd behavior and need to always dominate the situation; earlier Dorcel's #1 star Anissa Kate lends her wattage to the title (it is Manon's first leading role to carry a film on her back), proudly servicing four guys in a tasteful orgy sequence. The tandem directors do not go in for the ritualized sex of the Rollin predecessor film, seen tantalizingly in a Bonus clip on the new DVD.
The movie builds to a logical conclusion and is worth seeing for delivering a thoughtful entertainment. Above all, Manon impresses with her winning smile, convincing posture of innocence (she even slips a neophyte's fleeting glance at the camera at one point) and offbeat beauty. Cast of studs perform mechanically as usual, except for Pascal who invests his role with the right measure of world-weariness.
