L'amour de femme

Its pretentious, nonsensical narration dragging it down, Nick Millard's L'AMOUR DE FEMME at least delivers arousing lesbian action and a solid dose of the auteur's leather boots fetish.

Starring the same unidentified toothy actress who played the title role in SCYLA, film features a book bearing its title "L'Amour de Femme". Various women masturbate and have sex with each other, colorfully photographed and wearing outlandish costumes including big floppy hats. Editing is random and music is all over the map (drawing on Nick's own library of oft-repeated tracks), ranging from folk guitar to jazz harpsichord.

Malta as Suzanne dominates visually, and it is easy to see why this busty blonde was a softcore favorite. What passes (in voice-over) for plot has a sort of lesbian rivalry over "ownership" of a young protégée. One of the lesbians has a "beard" of a husband named Peter, who is more interested in his boyfriends, though Nick as usual does not venture into any male homosexuality depicted on screen. Much has been made by latter-day "scholars" concerning Nick's unhappy endings, but this one seems tacked-on and pointless.

Overall, the quality of Millard's photography and casting of beautiful women makes L'AMOUR DE FEMME suitable masturbation fodder.

Fabulous piece of work from this most idiosyncratic of softcore film makers. Sure, the narrative is pretentious, naive and inappropriate by turn but along with the crazy mixed up soundtrack helps to create an almost surreal place for the lesbian gyrating to take place. Because Nick shoots in a way that pleases him the sex scenes look like no others. He is not interested in conforming to any set procedure and so we get odd and unusual angles close-ups and cuts all increasing the sense that this might be real. Intercut with arid cityscapes and the tale of Kiki who we are told is looking for the answer to the universe and seems to find it in temporarily with rough sex with a prostitute! he twice shows a girl drying after a shower and not the shower itself which one might expect and it is amazing just how much sexy this is. Maybe because we are so used to seeing the soapy stroking, which, of course nobody ever does in the absence of a camera. Great stuff.