The French sex film industry gets self-interrogative - if not quite enough - in the theoretical behind-the-scenes porno farce QUEUE DE BETON.
Marie-Claude Viollet stars as Dominique, who ends up getting the job directing a porn flick when her boyfriend, the original director, comes down with a stomach flu. Arriving on set, she's quickly set upon by Golden Age French porn star Richard Allan, who introduces himself by his nom de guerre, the eponymous Queue de Beton ("Concrete Cock"). Surprising Allan by revealing she's the director, Dominique is nevertheless pressed into service when another actress refuses to do anal, leading her to perform inglorious double duty as stunt butt. From here, the film devolves into a series of disjointed sexual encounters, with most of the pretense of the film production falling by the wayside.
Euro porn has often struck me as largely disinterested in narrative, and QUEUE DE BETON is a prime example: while the interstitial scenes are funny parodies of the circumstances of genre production - crewmembers mention working on French New Wave films in the past, prior assistants to Jean-Luc Godard now slumming it in porn - the sex scenes themselves seem inserted as an afterthought. Managing to weave in narratively cohesive sex should be easy in a story set on a porn shoot, but the film constantly features characters just wandering off, getting involved in a sex contest or some other nonsense that has nothing to do with the story. The sex scenes themselves are rote, professionally performed by the experienced cast but without any heat or energy. The sole exception is a late-film encounter with Allan that takes place in a room festooned with posters for Jean-Francois Davy's VILLAGE GIRLS (under its original title "La Chatte sur un Toit Brulant," a funny parody of the French title for CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF) and draped in clear protective plastic, which allows the two actors to pour flour and eggs all over each other in a bizarre but oddly sexy baking-related scene.
Obviously ambivalent about the genre itself - and finding plenty of amusing asides to make during its linking scenes - it's too bad QUEUE DE BETON couldn't have kept up this spirit of invention during its sexual encounters, which it contents itself with critiquing in the broader narrative while, in the moment, settling for more of the same old, same old.
