Francis Mishkind's Alpha France was THE porn production company to be reckoned with, both in terms of quantity and quality, during the French equivalent of adult's Golden Age. With a string of self-owned theaters to showcase them, his output remained on constant display (through occasional re-titlings) until theatrical porn pretty much collapsed around the mid-eighties. Even then, video (and now DVD) sales kept most of these titles very much in the public eye, reinforcing the old Alpha France logo as a sign of superior quality.
The company's in-house directors ran the gamut from the safe purveyors of naughtiness for the middle class demographic (Jean-Claude Roy aka "Patrick Aubin", Claude Bernard-Aubert aka "Burd Tranbaree") to subtle subversives (Francis Leroi aka "Jim Clack", Claude Mulot aka "Frédéric Lansac"). The blatantly in your face Gérard Kikoïne always did stick out like a sore thumb in this generally well-behaved company. Where Leroi might gently push the envelope, Kikoïne would gleefully light a stick of dynamite, shock the bourgeois patron out of his everyday complacency, madly fiddling while Rome burnt to a crisp.
While call girl Claire (the radiant Marilyn Jess) awaits her next client in her fancy New York hotel room (exterior shots probably shot by Kikoïne while he was over there making THE TALE OF TIFFANY LUST and APHRODESIA'S DIARY back to back that same year), she remembers how she got there. Unable to have sexual relations of any kind since she was raped (unseen) by her boorish father (Jacques Marbeuf, somehow perfect for the part...), she meets the mysterious Laurence (exotic Mika Barthel), "Lola" to her friends (hence the film's best known retitling as ADORABLE LOLA), who fled the country a decade earlier due to a similar fate as well as an incestuous attraction to her now dead dad. Whew ! As she's welcomed by Claire's old man in his inimitable fashion (cue a particularly nasty rape scene taking away all lingering doubts that this might be some kind of "couples movie"), the girl watches through the window with a mixture of shock and fascination. The two women meet and Lola volunteers to become mentor to her younger charge, initiating her into the ways of the world, achieving your own goals as you offer men what they want most, easing Claire out of her rape-induced frigidity. Typically for Kikoïne, it is never clear whether Lola really wants to help Claire overcome her past or if she wants to take revenge on the girl's two-faced father by corrupting his daughter's innocence.
The sex is pretty strong stuff with a stylish excursion into whips 'n' chains territory and a teeth-grinding rectal assault, one of few such scenes the exquisite Marilyn Jess ever agreed to. Contrary to current kinkfests, one never forgets that one is watching the work of a real filmmaker with Kikoïne highlighting bizarre visual detail and adding unnerving soundtrack flourishes such as the sudden laughter of unseen children growing ever more distant, a sure sign of Claire's "loss of innocence" perhaps ?