French Postcard

By J.C.

LE SEX SHOP

Direction and Screenplay by CLAUDE BERRI The Rue St. Denis in Paris has achieved, as the guidebooks might say, a certain renown for the variety of physical entertainment available both to the serious shopper and the casual pedestrian. In this unlikely location, Claude (Claude Berri) runs a bookstore dedicated to more cerebral pursuits. He is a family man, with a sprightly young wife (Juliet Berto), snug in the insulation of his books, but a little concerned that his shop does not flourish.

A real estate broker friend persuades him to convert it into something more appropriate to the neighborhood. He stocks his shelves with volumes of pornographic fantasies and the apparatus to make them real--everything from vibrators to leather harnesses. The place is renamed Sex Shop, with every letter over the door spelled out in light bulbs that burn brightly even at noon. Browsing, except by minors, is encouraged.

The professional women of the neighborhood are a little rankled at the competition, but business booms.

The effects of making more money and living in the midst of sexual stimuli can be guessed with a minimum of imagination, which is precisely what Director-Writer Berri has brought to bear. He does manage to avoid passing quick moral judgments. In fact, he manages to avoid judgments or insights of almost any kind in his general dither to be cute. Everything in Le Sex Shop is cute: the frustrated husbands and thwarted libertines, the perversions, the jokes, the whores, even the erotic apparatus. For the viewer, the effect of all this simultaneous coyness and brashness is like getting chucked under the chin with a dildo.

Claude comes under the influence of a couple of married swingers (Nathalie Delon, Jean-Pierre Marielle) who try to enlist him in the joys of communal sex. He is tempted but resists, and instead uses his wife as an outlet for his mounting energies and disintegrating inhibitions, as well as his expanding knowledge of geometrically complex sexual postures. After his wife persuades him to hire a clerk to staff the shop (Beatrice Romand), Claude tries to seduce the clerk, but she turns out to be more interested in Claude's wife. Finally every body goes off on a sort of free-for-all Mediterranean cruise. In the worst tradition of French farce, Claude's wife fakes inconstancy with another man to arouse her husband's dormant jealousies and revive his sense of the bourgeois proprieties.

Claude's customers, his fellow seekers after sexual peace through profligacy, are all a little shabby, a little desperate, but Berri can see no urgency or meaning in their needs. He treats them all like a crew of school kids caught playing doctor. As a film maker, he lacks what his characters are all trying to find: passion.

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