I pick the second installment, known by the title ‘The Joys of a Woman’, because I think it is a film where pretty much all the elements of cinema that can be manipulated to attract the senses of the audience in a sensual manner have been effectively executed.
I could have picked any of the Emmanuelle films to write about on here, because they are all soft-core wonders that made it big at the box office, appealing to a wide range of mainstream audiences at the time of their respective releases. This is one of Pasolini’s more simple watches, which isn’t saying much, because he never made easy films. Of course, the difference here is the coherent structure and the unwillingness to exhilarate the audience sensually (a trait in even the sexiest of the director’s films), but since the tales are particularly sexy themselves, there are little setbacks and corner-cuts thrown in, to communicate the essence of these short retellings in their full. These stories are excessively erotic in nature, and translating that to film Pasolini-style easily makes a lot of the visuals seemingly pornographic in nature. Adapting eight of the famous Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, the film has its base set amongst a couple of pilgrims traveling to Canterbury, in a journey that is absolutely mundane and boring, forcing them to tell stories to excite themselves. Pier Paolo Pasolini is a dangerous filmmaker, and by that I mean to say that his works may be characterized as brash, unafraid, and extreme.
Personally, I adore the way this film ends, because there is this sense of completeness provided, which isn’t easy to communicate given how hazy the narrative is.
Primarily, I would say that this looseness to the film’s storyline is what makes it resemble a pornographic feature the most, since even with all that nudity, it is this specific aspect that makes Philip Kaufman’s directorial venture stand out from the crowd. Not really constrained by means of a structured plot, the film sees Anais going about and exploring the different layers to human seduction by making love with several other people, including Henry himself at a point in the tale. Charmed by the way they go about their sexual lives, she takes inspiration to spice up her own back home, with her husband Hugo. In the novel from which this film is adapted, Anais Nin’s character is intrigued by the titular couple, who helps decorate her erotic writing style. There are a lot of brash conversations about the act too (with pretty much nothing else in between), slightly deviating away from the actual narrative even, at several times in the film. It isn’t just the sex that makes this film eligible, though. Being a witness to such events, there is a scene where the journalist herself gets intrigued well enough to try out the sex acts for herself. These include blowjobs, masturbation, and pleasurable lovemaking. Though nothing is too graphic, several key sex acts are implied and performed on screen. Following a female journalist played by Juliette Binoche, who, as part of her assignment, enters a prostitution ring run by college students, much of the sleazy activities that warrant this film a place on this list happen while she is there. ‘Elles’ is a shocking film that could have easily fallen under the class of a soft-core porn feature had it been more explicit. You can watch some of these mainstream movies on Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime. Here is the list of top mainstream movies that are almost porn. Ultimately, what matters is whether these so-called near porn films delivered the message home. Some of you may feel the choice of having explicit sex scenes in the films is artistic, whereas others may feel these movies are pornographic.