There's one thing you can say about the French film industry of the 1960's and 1970's - they weren't afraid to depict raw, graphic, no-holds barred human sexuality. The 1973 feature film from renowned horror Director Jean Rollin named "Bacchanales Sexuelles" (a.k.a. "Fly Me the French Way") is as good an example as could be imagined of filming that is done the French way. The film is about sex, sex, and more sex, and about very little else.

Sure, the film has a plot of a marginal nature - clearly some sort of storyline is an obligation even withstanding the film's decidedly one-sided concern. The story relates to a strange cult with sexual deviance (what else?) at its core - the head-mistress orders a wide array of aberrant behavior for her personal pleasure and much to the delight of her submissive minions. She orders the kidnapping of a particular beautiful young lady for the purposes of obtaining another willing playmate, but her crew captures the wrong lovely lady by mistake.

But all of these shenanigans are decidedly unnecessary diversions from the real story, and the real story relates to the proclivity of any and all characters depicted in the film to jump into bed with one another without the slightest hesitation. Indeed, the number of sexual episodes that occur utterly coincidentally (simply based on the presence of two willing participants at the same place and the same time) are almost uncountable - but they clearly total more than a dozen.

While "Bacchanales Sexuelles" is considered soft-core in nature, at least from the point of view of modern-day censor boards, it lies on the harder end of the soft-core spectrum. The film features nudity in all of its uncensored glory, albeit in the case of the men, the key regions are sheathed in shadow. Nonetheless, even if the participants are great physical actors (much better than the majority of their harder-core counterparts), the film isn't quite as erotic as might be expected. Part of the trouble relates to the un-doctored nature of the bodies on the screen - while the actors are the creme-de-la-creme of France's physical specimens, they still possess sufficient physical flaws that the camera can not (or is not designed to) hide.

I suppose this is a testament to Director Rollin (who is actually credited in the film as Michel Gentil). He does not resort to fancy camera techniques or contrived lighting in order to portray his subjects in unnatural beauty. "Bacchanales Sexuelles" is one of the rawest "mainstream" films that you are likely to find that was made circa 1973, but this does not immediately mean that it is the most titillating. Nonetheless, if you're a fan of cult cinema (and you just so happen to be a fan of sex), you'll probably find much to enjoy in "Fly Me the French Way." / Reviewed by Jason Van Bergen - www.thecritics.org /

Additional Details
Country / Выпущено: France
Company / Производство: Nordia Films
Duration / Продолжительность: 01:41:52
Language / Язык: French
Sub-title / Субтитры: English

DVDRip
Format: AVI 1.0 (VFW 1.1)
Video Stream: XviD MPEG-4, 656x384 (1.71:1), 23.976 fps, 2113 kbps avg, 0.35 bit/pixel
Audio Stream #1: AC3 Dolby Digital, 48 kHz, 2/0 (L,R) ch, 192 kbps
Size: 1686.85 Mb (1 768 790 016 bytes)