Reviews (1)
In line with the change in social norms and with respect to the contemporary habits of porn viewers, porn today shows sex as something strictly private and as the antithesis of public activities and commitments. A number of the more inventive filmmakers base the effect of their films on voyeuristic pleasure, or on the excitement that comes with watching two people at moments when no one else should see them. In contrast to that, French Sex Lessons ranks among the films that were made after the sexual revolution and put sex on the level of social and public activities, or rather made sex a point of social interest among a broad spectrum of people. Though sex had been relegated to the realm of privacy, no one made it taboo or saw it as something shocking. On the contrary, the overarching principle of such films was naturalness and immediacy, which made sex the equivalent of a discussion over a glass of wine or a board game. Whereas in American porn in the late 1970s and early ‘80s the voyeuristic approach was already becoming more prominent (see the phenomenal look behind the façade of middle-class society in the legendary Taboo), on the old continent at that time they were still making films that presented sex as the be-all and end-all of society. French Sex Lessons is a playfully overwrought film in which a former madam opens a private sex school where young women – each of them for different reasons – learn how to be the best lovers. The story, which is similar to that of The Opening of Misty Beethoven, the iconic porn variation on Pygmalion and one of the leading titles of the porn style described above, mostly takes place in the space of a single house, but its concept of sex as a graded school subject makes the film a captivatingly exaggerated celebration of sexuality as an entirely rational act and a personal virtue ensuring a good standing in society. In this respect, the storyline involving the gradual elimination of chasteness and shame in one of the schoolgirls, who, unlike her more experienced classmates, is a virgin and was sent to the school by her boyfriend because he found her virginity unnatural, is magnificent. Besides the sequence with the teacher’s punishment of an extremely horny bisexual student, the highlight of the film is the grandiose sequence (taking up approximately one-third of the runtime) of the final school play, when the guys whose girlfriends study at the school and some patrons watch a demonstration of the skills that the individual schoolgirls have learned.
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