Enquêtes

Three factors elevate this French porn flick above the average of the time and give it a certain chance to be memorable. The first is the rather the curious fact that, alongside French stars Brigitte Lahaie and Karine Gambier, American star Desiree Cousteau also appears in the film, which further illustrates the lively movement of actors and filmmakers between Europe and America in the context of porn productions. The second factor is the scriptwriting assistance of one of the few truly great auteurs of world pornography, Claude Mulot. His input is evident both in the opening sequence in the park in front of the Eiffel Tower and in the stylisation of the main protagonist, a reporter seeking material for a story on the life of call girls. In the plot-oriented scenes (of which the film contains a maximum), he becomes a typically Mulot-style caricature of macho stereotypes, inhabiting a space somewhere between an overgrown boy and a macho clown, whose level-headedness always gets him into trouble. Unlike Mulot’s own films, however, there is no conceptual satire to speak of here, but merely jokes at the expense of the cliché of the outsized porn hero. Whereas Claude Mulot’s original projects were memorable due to their sophisticated screenplays and as sophisticated commentaries on the issues of gender and sexuality in society, this film directed by Gérard Kikoïn is a more typical title of the late 1970s and early 1980s. French production was drastically declining in quality at that time and individual titles competed with each other not by trying to appeal to a broader audience, but rather by trying to one-up each other in bizarre and absurd perversions. It is in this area that Enquêtes (or Call Girls de Luxe) gains the last little advantage. The individual sex scenes are characterised by an escalating humorous eccentricity of premise and execution, culminating in a truly praiseworthy sequence of Brigitte Lahaie having sex with a mime who is pretending to be a robot, holding the appropriate facial expressions and movements without even blinking, which further escalates the bizarreness of the whole scene. (2015.12.04)