Sévices Militaires

The recent collaboration between British filmmaker Liselle Bailey and venerable French pornographer Marc Dorcel may go down as the finest work of Dorcel's 40-year career, as evidenced by several recent classic releases including "L'obsedee" and this new one on the subject of military training.

Liselle brilliantly cast Brandi Love and Rebecca More as almost lookalike MILFs portraying the incoming and outgoing commanders of a secret military installation in Poland. The year is 1994 and both lady officers, in chronological succession, put their male and female soldiers through their paces for a 90-day program.

Doesn't sound like porn, especially in these benighted times when gonzo rules, but Liselle demonstrates once again that an Adult filmmaker can still take his or her work seriously and create an XXX facsimile of a mainstream motion picture, rather than giving into the prevailing "sex is all" consensus.

So "Military Misconduct" plays like a real movie, but with explicit sex deftly integrated into the structure. Sure, the modern pauses for sex scenes are lengthy rather than the approx. 4 to 8 minute interludes of theatrical porn (back in the '70s), but Bailey's precision and incisive direction keep one's interest for over 2 hours, no mean feat for an audience addicted to one vignette and out.

Besides excellent acting (and sexual performing) by the two leading ladies and the rest of the ensemble, Bailey is blessed with dynamite production values. She has an abandoned British military base to play with, an underground facility that looks real because it is, and affords very interesting settings for the sex and the interstitial scenes of training.

Overall theme is femme domination, not the corny femdom of so many bondage/fetish videos but rather a porn equivalent to those military war of wills that used to make for classic drama on screen (I'm thinking of Lumet's "The Hill" as well as many bigger, prestige pictures like Lean's "Bridge on the River Kwai").

More, a favorite Brit Porn icon who is always arousing whether working for Tanya Hyde or more recently Dick Bush (he was the cameraman on this feature), is letter-perfect, sexually initiating private Sam Bourne in a cool, spell-binding early sex scene. The way she uses him to service her, while a sergeant played by American guest star Xander Corvus is forced to stand at attention, only able to peek voyeuristically at the action, is marvelous.

Bailey uses repeated camera set-ups and other doppelganger effects to mirror this action when Brandi arrives as Rebecca's scheduled replacement. She similarly takes sexual advantage of the soldiers under her, including Corvus and a stunning Euro actress Cassie Del Isla, who undoubtedly will be back in Dorcel's stable for future projects.