From the archive, 9 December 1976: Bluest movie yet opens in London

http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2013/dec/09/sex-porn-movie-exhibition-french

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"I'm fed up with stars who supposedly have great bodies but it's really my arse," says Claudine Beccarie, porno star in Exhibition (Pigalle, X, GLC only). The film is a document, but not quite a documentary, about her life and times which has been labeled the bluest yet to open publically in London. And Mlle Beccarie clearly knows what she is talking about, though the most titillating knowledge of all – exactly whose bottom hers has stood in for – is understandably never imparted.

Shown at the New York Festival, presided over by our own Richard Roud, the film has a reasonably serious reputation even though its director, Jean-François Davy, has previous features to his credit called Bananes Mechaniques and so forth. It is one of several versions around and not the most whole-hearted, sexually speaking, available – when I saw it in Los Angeles the group sex scene was a great deal more explicit and the final traumatic masturbation sequence considerably longer. The censor, however, is not the cause of the tidying up. He simply didn't pass it.

That said, I hardly think it is a film for the dirty mac brigade, though whether others will actually find it valuable is a moot point. I find it a curious mixture of exploitation and reasonably honourable exquiry in which the director asks some useful questions on the way to linking his own pockets with a self-evident hit. "A licence for filth" was the verdict of Voice of the People whose column in the Sunday People ended with the entirely predictable flourish: "Too many blue films are getting the green light."

But it seems to me that the other moralists might surmise that Mlle Beccarie has exposed remarkably well the hazards of her journey from taking vows in the Cadettes of the Virgin at school to taking her money as sex queen of the French porno trade, via a reformatory and a Spanish brothel, where old men did things to her she'll never forget.

She seems at any rate more put upon than most but fortunately blessed with the equipment to profit from it, a not unhumorous lady who says she is happy in her work though ever since a film called Cake Orgy she's hated coffee icing. Clearly she feels it is eat or be eaten in this world, and it would take a first-class hypocrite to blame her.

Exhibition shows her with her regular boyfriend (who also performs in porno but clearly doesn't like M Davy much) in front of the camera at work and just talking; "Men don't know what they want. Then never, ever do." There are some queasy moments, such as when a young man practicing with her on a bed is rendered impotent by her bitchy experience; "Do you really kiss your girlfriend like that?" And the director's merciless state at her final masturbation scene, too voyeuristic to be remotely comfortable, is surely questionable. Though it does elicit through her tears, a full confession of the miseries of her early life.

But on the whole the film, messily cut and loosely made as it is, does give cause for thought. Most of mine revolved around her partial triumph over total exploitation and the feeling that Mlle Beccarie deserves every last franc she can screw out her steely-eyed paymasters.

The film, however, is not a patch on Oshima's Empire of the Senses, shown last weekend at the London Festival, now awaiting customs clearance for an English distributor, and also unlikely to get a certificate from the Censor.

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