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Naked Sex
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray B - United Kingdom - 88 Films Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (27th June 2025). |
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The Film
 José Bénazéraf's Naked Sex is an odd but not uninteresting failure as an experimental work of erotic cinema. The film opens with a science fiction element as text sets the stage noting that Alain (Sexus' Alain Tissier) relates the details of his erotic life to "Elle" – "the safe haven woman, the zero woman" – who experiences them physically and psychically through the recollections of his orgasms. Aside from one or two more cutaways, the rest of the film forgets that thread; instead intercutting his sexual past with bedroom tussling and verbal sparring with mistress Rosa (The Blood Rose's Valérie Boisgel) including his high school art teacher (Nadège Millerot), a salesgirl (Successive Slidings of Pleasure's Nathalie Zeiger) during his college days who actually took his virginity, the exciting courtship and bored domesticity with wife Chantal (Private Club's Chantal Arondel) livened up first on a cerebral level by his erotic imagination and then as the intellectual diversions of his wife's pretentious parties move towards the sexual and the Sadeian leading to infidelity "in the flesh." While most of the film is set in concrete settings, the episodic flashback nature of the storytelling turns these spaces into performative stages including the art class, the raincoat theater where Alain and the shop girl have their first date – the basement of which is decorated with posters from earlier Bénazéraf films – the train where he and Chantal consummate their relationship spied upon by a pair of lesbians, Alain's and Chantal's home where their guests are arranged in tableaux vivants like something out of an Alain Robbe-Grillet (or Jess Franco) film, and even his car where he and Chantal pick up a hitchhiker (Sex Rally's Noëlle Louvet) and he later picks up a prostitute (Frederica Page) shot against a black background and quite obviously being rocked by crew members offscreen. Rosa's abode also as a theatrical aspect in that it looks like a photo studio with stone floors and walls sparsley furnished with a circular bed and a bathtub shot from above in what seems to be a bathroom but is obviously also a make-up room. The sex and nudity is copious but the episodic nature is choppy, perhaps deliberately so Alain's sexual past seems to be how he defines his life ("You think your erection makes you a philosopher," says Rosa who seems to be pressing Alain for something more than the physical details of his sexual conquests). Alain playfully calls Rosa a "dirty whore" while labels him a "slut" and it could be argued that Bénazéraf's camera and the women objectify Tissier's face and body as much as he does the women with a number of sequences that hold on expressionless face or favor his physique in postcoital compositions that seem almost sculptural poses. The uncredited electronic score retains the science fiction element but the film never returns to that aspect, instead painting a portrait of a man who deals with emotional upheavals by one sexual conquest after another, the last two vignettes involving the prostitute and then his secretary (Sexually Yours' Dany Daniel) leaving all involved feeling alienated (including the viewer). Tissier, nephew of actor Jean Tissier (The Widow Couderc), made four films with Bénazéraf and was also a regular in softfcore erotica of the seventies (he also appeared in Bénazéraf's hardcore La planque 2 but the cast list includes a handful of softcore regulars so the hardcore content may be inserts or extras). The supporting cast is interesting if not always best "exploited" including Les demoniaques's Patricia Hermenier, Zombie Lake's Gilda Arancio, and Jerry Brouer – who had bit parts in French and German softcore erotica as well as some of the Dutch Sex Wave films of the seventies – as orgy guests. 
Video
Not dubbed into English, Naked Sex has only been available on tape and DVD in France. Presumably 88 Films' 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 widescreen Blu-ray comes from the HD master prepared in the DVD days with some signs of sharpening, somewhat crushed blacks, a bit of trailing of illuminated subjects against dark backgrounds in combination with some of the blooming filtration of the original cinematography. 
Audio
The French mono track is entirely post-dubbed and the LPCM 2.0 mono track boasts clean dialogue, effects, and music. Optional English subtitles appear free of any obvious errors. 
Extras
There are no extras. Some contextual information might have been nice, although scholarly coverage of Bénazéraf's filmography as well as interviews with him - including the chapter on him in Cathal Tohill's and Pete Tombs' Immoral Tales: European Sex & Horror Movies, 1956-1984 - generally shop short of his mid-seventies and eighties erotica (hard or otherwise). 
Overall
The episodic Naked Sex not so much drops as forgets its sci-fi element early on, instead focusing on the portrait of a man who uses sexual conquests as a coping mechanism that leaves him, his partners, and the viewer feeling equally empty.
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