The Good Old Naughty Days
France 2002
Reviewed by Linda Ruth Williams
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Twelve short films dating from 1905 to 1930 featuring men and women in combinations of heterosexual, lesbian, gay, bisexual and group-sex scenarios. Across the variety of films spanking, cunnilingus, fellatio, group sex, voyeurism, urination, masturbation, anal and vaginal intercourse, ejaculation and bestiality are graphically depicted.
Review
To my knowledge The Good Old Naughty Days is the first R18-rated film to be reviewed by Sight & Sound , but then it is released under rather unusual circumstances. In the wake of classification sea changes on the part of the BBFC since 2000 there has been a greater tolerance towards consensual but explicit sexual material, enabling the jolly frolics of this film (made up of 12 shorts from 1905-30) to reach the UK public. However R18 is something of a ghetto category, legitimising hardcore pornography only available in licensed sex clubs. Because home viewing now dominates how people access porn (why watch in a public cinema when you can watch on your own sofa?), R18 has also effectively become a video-only category. To release an R18 film into cinemas is thus unprecedented, and can only lead one to surmise that the distributors, Tartan Films, are trying to make a point. They are not home and dry yet. Exhibiting the film will require turning the public space of the cinema into a limited private space, for one night only perhaps. Cinemas hoping to show this film will presumably have to apply for a licence to take on the 'private club' identity for the duration of the movie. This may turn out to be a useful national gauge of audience interest in hardcore.
The Good Old Naughty Days is certainly attractive bait, though it demonstrates there's nothing new under the sun. The material is largely identical to swathes of today's heterosexual hardcore - varying doses of male and female bodies do oral and genital things to each other in an explicit combination of penetration, visible money shots, and inventive three- or four-way action. But such content in this format - the 1920s one-reeler rather than VHS or the web - somehow makes The Good Old Naughty Days seem both charmingly anachronistic and right on the button. One might be tempted to call this soft in comparison to nastier 'extra-hard' forms of contemporary hardcore - there's no extreme psycho-sex, no sense of threat, little sexual paraphernalia. What looks like fetish gear to us (period stocking tops, corsets and ample frothy knickers) is everyday wear to these performers. Everyone seems to be having a jolly good time, and orgies develop from the premise of people taking tea on a sunny terrace (in 'Tea Time' they return to tea-drinking, naked, afterwards too) or meeting on seaside promenades. It also lacks the obsessively anal focus of some of today's hardcore, but the partner-swapping does allow for man-on-man action, rare in today's heterosexual porn (though lesbian titillation for men has remained a genre staple). That these are, generally speaking, 'everyday' bedroom practices (with the exception, perhaps, of the dog, the nuns and the excited man in 'La Fessée à l'école') belies the shock value of seeing them paraded on-screen, one after another, for audiences (like the mainstream British public) who may not be used to 'this kind of thing'.
Which begs the question of repetition. According to the pressnotes, these shorts were destined to be visual aphrodisiacs, projected in men's brothels as an aperitif to the real action, or to educate naive young men in how to deal with the wiles of the female body. Viewing them in a long sequence, in a context where active sex is discouraged (one imagines Tartan will not expect frigging in the Other Cinema, their London venue, unconfirmed at the time of going to press), necessarily produces a different view. The repetitive nature of the material (lots of scenes of two women and one man arranged in tableaux) soon produces a kind of voyeuristic burn-out, meaning you notice more strongly how these anonymous film-makers tried to ring the changes, often with humour.
The bodies are also refreshingly fleshy - the consistency with which corpulent bottoms and cellulite dimples parade across the screen underpins the argument that sexy bodies are as fashion-governed as the clothes those bodies readily shed. No one takes themselves very seriously (wigs and moustaches keep slipping), and the intertitles produce a deliciously wicked metaphorical commentary on the action. 'Mousquetaire au restaurant', a period skit on French gourmandising, makes the obvious connection between sex and food, with each 'course' introduced by an obscenely illustrated intertitle. Other shorts show that some of the genre's most reliable scenarios were fully in place by the 1920s - a clinic staffed by obliging nurses; naughty teachers and pupils. Though the camera only moves in the 1930 contribution, each film is amply edited, and (with the exception of 'La Coiffeuse' from 1905) all use some form of close-up to detail what bodily parts are doing. Perhaps the most interesting of the lot, however, is not a live-action performance but the 1925 US animation 'Buried Treasure', which charts the surreal extremes of a horny hero called Eveready Harton, whose penis sometimes runs off by itself. When his lady proves literally impenetrable, he has to pull a range of random objects from her vagina (a clock, a shoe, a crab). As a kind of hardcore seaside postcard, it literalises a range of anxieties about what desire does to the desirer, territory the other films aren't interested in charting. Now, however, these shorts have acquired the respectability of the historical document, thanks to this release and a careful restoration. No doubt for your average arthouse punter this austere sense of authenticity provides a convenient disclaimer to justify a peek.
Credits
- Director
- Michel Reilhac
- Producer
- Michel Reilhac
- Inspired by
- Pascal Greggory
- Based on an idea by
- Michel Reilhac
Sébastien Marnier - Editor
- Lobster Films
- Music
- Eric Le Guen