Review
Softcore pornography is a dying art form. In the late sixties and early seventies, this "mainstream" form of sex cinema was a hell of a lot more erotic than it's bastard offspring that fills up the wee hours of late night cable. The people in these films looked more like your neighbors, and less the silicone ideal presented today, and stuff just felt...oh, I guess....dirtier. It stands to reason that people should be aroused by more accurate depictions of attractive yet common folks having a go in the sheets than surgically altered, over made-up Barbies and Kens, but little by little, the gloss came into porn; out with the real and in with the ideal. It's a shame, because, while not an avid viewer of the stuff, I'd certainly watch more if it were as erotic as Jean Rollin's 1974 farce, Bacchanales Sexuelles.
Valerie (Joëlle Coeur) inherits her cousin Paul's (Jean-Paul Hazy) Paris apartment for a few months while he's on vacation in New York. Valerie invites her friend Sophie (Marie-France Morel) over for some small talk, vodka, and extremely hot lesbian sex. Sophie is awoken by catsuit wearing burglars with huge nipples, kidnapped, and taken off to a private estate run by the wicked dominatrix, Malvina (Brigitte Borghese) who thinks Sophie is actually Valerie. It seems that Valerie's cousin is in possession of a batch of photos that Malvina uses to blackmail people into becoming a sex slave. Valerie and Sophie's pal Fred (Alain Bastin) find out Sophie's whereabouts after a threesome with fake maid Jenny (Agnès Lemercier) sent by Malvina to search for the photos. When Valerie and Fred break in to Malvina's estate with a plan to liberate all of her sex slaves, Malvina...you're still reading? Yeah, okay, the story sucks and doesn't matter. You want to know how much sex there is, dont'cha?
Rollin has these actors in more positions than the Kama Sutra, and while the sex is at both times simulated and/or well concealed, it's pretty damned hot. The scene between Valerie and Sophie at the beginning of the film will definitely stir loins, and, to be honest, I think it's all the hotter that some stuff is left to the imagination. However, I watched this with my girlfriend, and while she admits it was "okay" as far as erotica goes, she continuously pointed out the fact that it was often too obvious that the guys were all pretty limp during the endless sex scenes. It actually looks as though they are wearing genital patches, while in most cases it is obvious the woman is not. Her argument was not a desire to see penises (and the moon is made of cheese and I'm its mayor) but a desire for some sort of softcore equality, which I guess I can understand. We certainly do see a lot more of the female anatomy than the softcore rules usually allow, but the male characters go out of their way not to reveal themselves, often clenching their legs together and mounting a woman like a stuffed marlin, or grinding against them at an impossible angle with their thigh. It's distracting when pointed out, but thankfully vanishes from memory when another hot looking pair of girls start tickling each other in a tub.
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/6C612D7E4B18AC7/bacchanales.sexuelles.1974.dvdrip.x264-cg.mkv
French audio and English soft subs
