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The French Love
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray B - United Kingdom - 88 Films Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (21st June 2025). |
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The Film
 After a holiday in France, reporter Bryan (Hermann Ryan) puts his wife and two daughters on a plane back home and remains to cover the Paris Peace Accords. He takes advantage of the use of his local boss' Rolls Royce to pick up a pair of hitchhiking stewardesses Corinne (Love Brides of the Blood Mummy's Catherine Franck) and Lucille (Les demoniaques' Patricia Hermenier) who become a fixture in his life over the next few days before he finally succeeds in bedding Corrine. While Bryan is surprised by the ease with which he cheated on his wife, his life truly begins to spiral and he starts to question all of his principles when he realizes that Corinne regards him as nothing more than a passing fling. Bryan tries to open his mind to a variety of experiences with Corrine and Lucille but repression and violence seem as integral to "American love" as freedom and unbridled pleasure is to The French Love. Before he became a prolific director of hardcore pornography – even more so in the eighties when video supplanted film in both shooting and distribution – José Bénazéraf helmed a number of experimental erotic films that played with various genre from the noir-ish Sin on the Beach and Joe Caligula to the Repulsion-esque psychological Frustration. The French Love feels like a Godardian anachronism possibly conceived during the 1968 riots and repurposed during the Paris Peace Accords that would have seemed more daring and "revolutionary" in less permissive times, particularly with its pop art look, examination of the hypocrisy of American morality, and the teasing nudity of the first half of the film. The finished film feels like a "failed experiment" with narration conveying Bryan's mindset over the spoken dialogue in which he tries to convey the same to his confidant. It is hard to tell if Ryan is just a non-actor or stilted by acting in another language – he does not seem to be French or American, sounding unnatural when speaking either – but some of the better moments are where he is speechless and violently physical while the female characters eloquently mock his "cowboy" machismo. Bénazéraf seems uninterested in following up on the early hints that the two women may be revolutionaries who targeted the reporter with Corinne describing Gaulism as a "cult" and Lucille taking advantage of Bryan's drunken sleep to use of his film splicer to cut together a manifesto film; on the other hand, these bits might be part of Bryan's misogynistic projection along with his later visit with Corinne to an orgy that gets invaded by rapist bikers (while he is tied up he seems to take pleasure in seeing Corinne gang-raped but then slaps her as soon as he is freed). The ending takes us through multiple scenarios in which Bryan guns down Corinne and her new lover (a boutique salesman who seemed to be a homosexual caricature when seen earlier in a montage that itself might have been a projection of Bryan's of the girls' hypocritical materialism). Even the final time Bryan shoots her, there is no blood, suggesting that the whole exercise is an "exorcism" of Corinne's influence on him that he needs before he can return to his old life where his "open mindedness extended no further than his neatly-manicured lawn" (that, or the aforementioned scenes are different versions that Bénazéraf and just decided to use all of them to bring the film up to feature-length which already seems overlong with a two-and-a-half minute silent opening montage of erotic details from Old Masters paintings). The sex scenes get more explicit in the second half of the film as if it were shot linearly and Bénazéraf realized he needed to heat things up, but the structure is so disjointed and the pacing so torpid that the scoring of Camille Sauvage (Orloff and the Invisible Man) adds to the monotony in just covering the action rather than underlining it or lending it any sense of momentum. The film was edited and sound designed by Bob Wade who tries to give the film some verve but was far more successful in his "sound scores" for the films of Alain Robbe-Grillet. In the years before hardcore pornography in France when softcore erotica could encompass a variety of genres, Bénazéraf had more of an opportunity to experiment and The French Love is more hit-than-miss and more interesting as a time capsule than exploitation. 
Video
Apparently unreleased theatrically outside of France, The French Love's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 widescreen Blu-ray presumably comes from the HD master rights owner LCJ struck for the 2013 2013 French DVD (the presence of 4:3 video masters of other Bénazéraf films in LCJ's line suggests that the new scan might have been out of necessity in the absence of an available master rather than the merits of the film itself). The image is clean and relatively sharp with saturated colors in the art direction that pops in contrast to the skin tones and some of the more muted wardrobe like the light green stewardess uniforms and the bizarre plum-colored sports coat the protagonist wears during the climax (which itself may be indicative of the scene's fantastical nature). 
Audio
The French LPCM 2.0 mono track seems to combine the usual post-dubbed dialogue (English and French) with some production audio whenever characters are just speaking English as if Bénazéraf gave up on trying to use those scenes to convey any sense of story and instead either added voiceover, narration, or used subsequent more scripted scenes to advance the film. Optional English subtitles are only available for the French dialogue however much some of the English could use transcription. 
Extras
There are absolutely no extras - the main menu only has a play option and a set-up one for turning subtitles on or off - even though this is a film that might have benefited from some sort of context either in its themes, execution, or place in Bénazéraf's filmography. 
Overall
In the years before hardcore pornography in France when softcore erotica could encompass a variety of genres, Jose Bénazéraf had more of an opportunity to experiment and The French Love is more hit-than-miss and more interesting as a time capsule than exploitation.
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