Steady on. With a title like the Pornographer, it doesn't take a clairvoyant to predict that nookie, and lots of it, will be a central tenant of Bertrand Bonello's second feature. Indeed, the British Board of Film Classification has already insisted on an 11 second cuts from one of the film's climatic (literally speaking) scenes. And though the film is being shown in its entirety here, there's not an awful lot to recommend it. Jean Pierre Leaud plays Jacques Laurent, a veteran porno director who is forced to come out of his self-imposed retirement in order to settle some debts. But things have changed since his heyday, and Laurent finds it difficult to readjust in the world of hardcore cinema. His son, Jeremie Renier, is having problems of his own after a failed 'career' as a student activist.
Although undoubtedly some will be entranced by Bonello's languid, dreary pacing and dodgy characterisation, there's something fundamentally askew about The Pornographer. Despite his willingness to show sex in a stark, almost vicious light, Bonello lacks the same insight into the complexities of the human condition that Paul Thomas Anderson aptly displayed in the infinitely superior Boogie Nights, and the Pornographer is a wasted excursion.
