Restructured from his softcore effort LA FEMME EN SPIRALE, Jean-Francois Davy's LINGERIES FINES ET PERVERSES concerns a female commercial director hired to shoot a porno flick. As the process of making the film starts causing her to reexamine her sexuality, she finds herself becoming obsessed with tracking down Pascale Miller (French porn star Olinka Hardiman), whom she tries to coax out of retirement to serve as her muse.
This plot - at least theoretically - is interesting, though like much French porn, the result is erratic, full of extraneous and disorienting sex scenes that do little to further the narrative. There's a way to view these as experimental, but unfortunately without a point to the experimentation there's little value to the experience: a recurring visual motif of sex rendered surrealist through a prismatic lens is interesting, but these shots are just dropped in at random. Without any rhyme or reason, it becomes distracting: momentarily arresting visually, these moments but neither effective as art nor porn.
By the end, the film proves woefully insufficient at its project of understanding female pleasure - it's unclear what the protagonist has supposedly learned about herself from this random assortment of sex scenes, and the viewer has never been given an opportunity to become invested in her journey. Helene Shirley is good in the lead and Marilyn Jess charming as ever, while Olinka seems frigid as always and contributes another of her idiotic dances, this time performed in the middle of a bar surrounded by nonplussed patrons. The behind-the-scenes glimpses the film offers at the French porn industry are interesting; I just wish it had done a better job focusing on its protagonist rather than random art school affectations. Maybe the softcore cut is better.
