This is a documentary on the 70's French porn industry that I was fortunate enough to see with English subtitles (and it actually does matter here). There are generally two kinds of porn documentaries--those that actually take an insightful look behind the scenes, and those that are just an excuse to show a lot of nudity and XXX porn footage. This is actually somewhere in between. It's generously seasoned with porn footage, but there are also a lot of (fully-clothed) interviews, and they even talk to the owners of porn theaters, some typical porn customers (including some pre-adolescent boys who are walking by the the theater--I wonder what their parents thought of that?), as well as a guy who makes promotional billboards for porn movies although he claims never to have seen one!
Of course, they also talk to porn directors and (usually naked) porn performers. The most interesting are the males who all cheerfully admit to bisexuality and demonstrate how they can "get it up" on camera with or without female help. Like many of their 70's male counterparts in America, the males actors actually have some talent BEYOND porn. One Italian actor comes in singing an operetta, sits down for a long, cheerful interview, arouses himself for the camera, calls a female co-star to finish him off (he might have faked that part), and then does a dance with her afterwards--impressive!
The females come off less well. Some are neophytes without much to say (even if they weren't talking with their mouths full). Others admit they're only in it for the money. Sylvia Bourdoine, one of the most unattractive actresses in 80's American porn after she "went Hollywood", stands out only in that you don't notice her among the generally very attractive female performers. I would have liked it if they had interviewed the lovely Beatrice Harnois, my personal favorite French sex actress of that time, but she appears only in one sex scene. Claudine Beccarie, who was quite famous at the time, comes off very badly as she insults her male co-stars on camera during their (attempted) sex scenes. Soon after this doc was made, she would turn vehemently against the porn industry (kind of like a French Linda Lovelace), but you get the idea it's only because it didn't take her where she thought she should have gone. Generally though, both the performers and directors seem much less delusional about their careers than their counterparts in America did during the heady 70's "porno chic" days.
They make tons of stuff like this these days about the modern-day American porn industry that are just as big of a waste of time as the "product" they tediously churn out, but this is more exotic since it's French and it's also from a far, far more interesting time.
