Le Pornographe (2001)
Directed by Bertrand Bonello

Film Review

Bertrand Bonello's second film is this intensely sombre meditative study of a man going through a Hellish mid-life crisis and his son's progression into adulthood.  Skilfully understated, the film uses long takes and sparse dialogue to amplify the existentialist mood conveyed by the extraordinary performances of its two lead actors: Jean-Pierre Léaud and Jérémie Rénier.  It is both a provocative and sumptuously filmed work, one which invites us to reflect on the meaning of our own lives in an increasingly corrupted and artistically bankrupt world.

Since his debut in François Truffaut's Les 400 coups, Jean-Pierre Léaud has been emblematic of the French cinéma d'auteur, an actor who is beloved by film enthusiasts the world over.  In recent years, his film career has enjoyed something of a renaissance, with Léaud finally finding roles which match both his talent and his late middle-aged appearance.  In Olivier Assayas' Irma Vep (1996), he gave a striking performance of a burnt-out filmmaker struggling to regain his creative powers.  In Le pornographe, Léaud finds himself in a similar role, although here the actor is more central to the film and this allows him to give what can plausibly be regarded as his best performance to date.  Far from being the energetic, articulate rebel of his youth, here we see the last vestige of a man looking back on the cooling embers of his life with melancholic sadness.  Whilst it is possible to pick holes in other aspects of the film, Jean-Pierre Léaud's contribution is unceasingly faultless.

On the basis of this and similar recent films, Jérémie Rénier looks like being a worthy successor to Jean-Pierre Léaud.  In Rénier, there is a similar intensity of performance and screen presence to what we see in his older co-star, making him ideal material for serious French film dramas.  Although Rénier's contribution is impressive, his character's presence in the film feels strangely intrusive, and this shows up one of the film's weak points.  By giving so much attention to Joseph, his love life and his political activities, the film diverts our attention too much from his father's mid-life crisis.  The film's impact is weakened slightly as a result of what feels like a forced narrative split between the two characters.

The film does contain sexually explicit material (some of which was excised by the British Board of Film Classification) - which some spectators may find offensive.  For these (brief but barely legal) scenes, Bonello engaged two porn stars, Ovidie and Titof.  It is debatable whether such scenes make a positive contribution to the film - a cynic would argue that they were included merely to reward porn-hungry low life who were lured into the cinema by the film's tantalising title.  A more generous reviewer would say that these scenes, shot with cold mechanical false-eroticism, are key to driving home the extent of the central character's frustration with his métier and his hankering for something better.

Film Synopsis

In the 1970s, Jacques Laurent was a major director of pornographic films in France.  In the early 1980s he gave up film making, frustrated at not being able to make the kind of films he wanted to.  Nearly twenty years on and heavily in debt, Jacques is compelled to return to making porn films, although he still intends to tackle more meaningful films.  Disillusioned with his work, he is cheered up when he makes contact with his son, Joseph, who walked out on him some years ago upon discovering his father's profession.