FRENCH CONNEXION was the first of French pornographer Marc Dorcel's luxury productions that I saw, and remains the standard of many more he's cranked out in a career dating back all the way to 1979.
His approach, which has been copied in America by such labels as Digital Playground, is to throw obvious money on the screen in the form of vast female cast lists and oodles of production value. The contrast with standard claustrophobic porn (not advanced much since the '70s chintzy "two folks f*cking in a motel room") is striking, and has attracted a fairly loyal audience.
Not to belabor the plot, this is a kind of Andy Sidaris movie gone mad with hardcore -as if the late great sexy action filmmaker (or his peer Russ Meyer) had lost his mind and filled the screen with condom-encased big European dicks double penetrating beautiful Eastern European starlets.
The international locations are impressive, though the storyline of Russian gangsters and partly true blue/partly corrupt French cops and agents makes less sense than a '50s Lemmy Caution thriller starring Eddie Constantine or a '60s German action film starring George Nader. Tony Carrera as tough cop Tony is an okay hero and many of the actresses were a turn-on, notably Jessica Fiorentino, Stacy Silver, Yasmine and Lydia St. Martin.
Lead role is ably performed, pre-breast surgery by Katsumi, who is still one of the best d.p. specialists in the business. Her confusing name history is a pet peeve of mine: first she was rechristened Katsuni in as terrifying a re-writing of history as when the under-legal-threat (good old World Wildlife Federation breathing down Vince's neck) WWF changed its name to WWE and promptly pretended in broadcasts and literature that it had ALWAYS been named WWE. More recently IMDb has rechristened her everywhere as Celine Tran, a moniker as far as I can tell she never (or at best rarely) uses professionally.
Well, for me she will always be Katsumi, and possessing natural breasts -that's old school and the way I like it. You can see from her thumbnail photo that if she isn't careful with continued surgery she might turn into Cher.
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