The Pornographer

Jacques (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is more like a philosopher in this movie by Bertrand Bonello than a director of a pornographic movie. He looks back at his life and explores the sense of his existence. It is not clear how he lives when he makes his last movie after some years of interruption and how he sees his future but he takes some comfort in the presence of his son. This movie is very sober and in fact it is pessimistic because it does not give us an answer about the meaning of the life of the main character Jacques. Is he sad about his career as a maker of pornographic movies or is he proud of his work?

Once upon a time, you grew old and grey working at a menial job for 35 or 40 years, until you received a handshake and a gold pocket watch. You then spent your retirement regretting not having done the things you dreamed of when you were younger, and with any luck, died in a few years. Oh, the good old days. Thanks to a struggling economy, and longer life expectancies, more retirees find themselves rejoining the workforce just to makes ends meet. Depending on your expertise, this can present some challenging situations.

Jacques' blissful retirement is rudely interrupted by three little words: non-sufficient funds. Lacking a pension, he has to resume his old calling - directing pornography. For Jacques, the pornography business has changed for the worse (?): nobody is interested in artistic vision anymore or plots, all they want is to film the sex and get it to video as soon as possible. The barbarians! Strangely enough, the work gives him the courage to contact the son he never knew, and think about embarking on a new life.

Although the movie revolves around a movie within a movie (the filming of a porn film), the bulk of the film is spent navel gazing, with the main character contemplating his life and place in the universe. Just as Jacques begins to emerge, he turns inward and becomes increasingly withdrawn, severing ties with everyone. While alienation can be used as a tool to entice an audience, neither the characters nor story in "The Pornographer" are strong enough to sustain our interest. The viewer is kept at arms length and never gets the opportunity to connect with the characters - I couldn't even commit to being blasé.

What could have been an interesting, gripping story, is ultimately a pointless empty shell of a film. Nuff said.

This film , as one previous reviewer has mentioned, is pretentious and boring. The sex scenes are gratuitous and add nothing to the narrative. This film has less of a reason to depict graphic sex than DEEP THROAT did yet it manages to work up to a senseless and oddly boring sexually graphic moment and with even worst actors (imagine that!)than that silly camp film.

It is fitting that at the turn of the century sex would be depicted as a silent dirty act by a tired old French director. He blames youth for the impotence in this bogus film and that is not fair. This movie lives in a vacuum of it's own making.

The worst of porn was never this bad. As the ads for the French Classic EMMANUELLE once stated, "x was never like this." The BBFC was right! Take ten second out and you have the impotent tragedy this film really is; Leave them in and you have exploitation of the public under false pretences. The director should apologise to us for subjecting us to this . We expect more out of French Cinema.

Jacques (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is the son of a doctor, born in 1950, who had dedicated his life from 1970 to 1984 to pornographic movies. His wife committed suicide when his son Joseph (Jérémie Rénier) was five, and when he was a teenager, he became aware of the profession of his father and left home. Presently Jacques is broken and has decided to accept the invitation to direct porno movies again. Meanwhile his son, now seventeen years old, decides to approach to him.

This film is so pretentious and boring that irritated me. The story is quite ridiculous, and the antagonistic philosophic behavior of Jacques is funny. A guy who dedicated his life (since twenty years old) to pornography, in the beginning just because he wanted to attract girls for having sex, worked along fourteen years with sex, is not to have an existential middle-age crisis like showed in the plot of this movie. I do not like porno movies and I am not a moralist person, but if I have to see explicit sex, at least lets see with beautiful actresses in erotic situation. I do not know the name of the 'actress' in the explicit scene, but she will certainly be marked for the rest of her career. I do not understand how such a crap was awarded in Cannes. My vote is four.

Title (Brazil): 'O Pornógrafo' ('The Pornographer')

We pray the United States Supreme Court is soon peopled by non-Puritans who will believe the First Amendment guarantees Americans the right to produce and watch what pleases them. The current federal court system is full of Reagan-era morons who do not believe we as a people have enough sense to decide for ourselves what we see on television and at the movies.

Having lived through the cultural revolution of the 1960's, I would have hoped to see by now more open minds on the bench and in the federal Executive Branch. Instead, we have had the same draconian moral arbiters we've had since the 1950's. For instance, instead of moving forward toward freedom from censorship, we have to deal with the likes of Bush's Federal Communications Commission chairman Michael Powell (son of "there can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons" Colin Powell), whose obsession with Janet Jackson's breast drove him to seek higher FCC fines to punish radio and television stations and networks who have the temerity to broadcast words and images which violate his poor Baptist ears.