The impending approach of Venus - known to cause "disturbing erotic behavior" - sends two men with very different missions to the town of Petit-Bois. One to save the schoolgirls from lust, the other to test a new aphrodisiac. Chaos ensues.
07 Mar Danish Pastries (1973)
Timothy Leery
I was happy to be able to find this old gem. In the early 70s, there was brief window when porn was where many cinematic experiments were happening. Some of them actually had some promise for being important. Perhaps the oddest is the porn musical. This is the most interesting from a historical perspective.
You have to place yourself in the era: a huge percentage of the population believed that the world was in a time of change for the better and this change had something to do with the overlap of free sex, drugs, some astrological appropriateness and the end of war. At the same time, the American government was hammering back on all fronts, while the Dutch and Danish governments were seemingly alone in supporting all four.
Coming out of Denmark were a series of porn comedies, this being the first. I understand the others are more pornish and less comedic, but this is something else: Woodstock porn.
The story is that some astrological time and place a feeling of love is supposed to occur. Two scientists appear in the town, one with a drug to minimize the effect and another with a drug that enhances it. In fine Shakespearean fashion, the two drugs get mixed up, with the enhancing one ending in the water supply.
Our field of focus is a girl’s school which looks a lot like a nunnery. The main action is of the girls after imbibing the drug and attacking the scientists and other males from the town. Along the way is a psychedelic dream and the ending romp in the reservoir straight out of “Hair” except everyone is nude and having explicit sex.
Unlike the porn of today, this is joyful and ecstatic. At the very end, the two scientists spy on the clearly pregnant schoolgirls and are pleased with their obvious pregnancies, ten apiece. The joyful nature of the thing, the drugs, the ordinariness of the girls wouldn’t happen today, nor any time outside of that brief period of hippydom.
Sure it is porn, but accidentally. This is hippy cinema first.
Posted in 2005
Ted’s Evaluation — 3 of 3: Worth watching.
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