Comment je suis devenue esclave sexuelle

Once high-ranking pornographer Michael Ninn continues his latter-day career for French distributor Marc Dorcel with another underwhelming feature. This mistitled opus has an interesting premise, but it's badly bungled.

Perhaps Ninn's new producer Max Candy is at fault - all his product so far has been lame. This one, with no one taking a script credit, posits a secret society, sort of a Masonic sorority, grooming youngsters from an early age to become the new elite 1% of the top 1%, but with a sexual orientation - in porn everything revolves around sex rather than mere real-world issues like money & greed. Scarlet Red is the protagonist that evil India Summer has been sponsoring ever since the death of her parents, and our story concerns her coming of age.

Sounds like a useful topic, sort of a sexual "Da Vinci Code", but Ninn's two hours on screen saps all the life out of it. We get fancy shots (overhead, craning, odd compositions, badly executed soft-focus) overwhelming the personal nature of the saga, with even the talented Scarlet ending up with a bland, inexpressive performance. The sex scenes are routine, even by the now-mechanical standards of a Dorcel video, and the plot twists once the initial gimmicks are unveiled have no bite. Worse yet, the finale including a couple of false endings, is preposterous. I guess when you have no script (credit deleted) it's hard to have adequate rewrites -like getting blood out of a stone.

Shot in English (but with narration and French-language texting displays on screen) with a mainly Chatsworth cast (plus some Euro beauties), we see Scarlet fall in love with Seth Gamble, but there are no sparks. India and others regale us with a tale of a conspiracy dating back to Caligula, who is cited as the Sorority's founder, and her claims that the sorority sponsored the Renaissance and gave Columbus his map are too silly for words. As with much porn, attempts at scope or loftiness get betrayed by a modest budget - in an over-stuffed Ridley Scott opus we'd get lavish scenes depicting this nonsense ("Here Chris, take this map") rather than just mouthing off.

When Scarlet begs off ("I just want to be normal") the dumb endings start piling up, but I found it all laughable. Sure, the Industry hands Ninn an award for being one of the good old boys, but he didn't earn it, not by a long shot. And of course we have to suffer through Max Candy in the cast as "Maxwell", India's silent (thankfully) assistant.