Ovidie's porn philosophy is well-known, and she is widely admired for sticking to her guns in challenging the industry's established routines and strictures. But with "Infidelity", her script undoes the auteur's good intentions, rendering a promising project stiff and unconvincing.
Using a doctor's office as format to knit together disparate vignettes, she presents three couples as paradigms of the problem of loss of desire in marriage. It may be a cliché, but as one character is wont to remind us, sleeping with the same person for 20 years can take the edge off a romantic relationship. In porn, the tendency is to take that principle to its Hefnerian extreme and posit that sleeping for half an hour with someone is cause for playing the field.
Chief protagonist Patrick, well-essayed by Rodolphe Antrim, likes to espouse a chauvinistic, patronizing and sexist philosophy which marks him as Ovidie's straw man in the film. No one has to knock down his arguments -they are obviously fallacious and put out there for the viewer to silently rebel against.
He's unfaithful to wife Nomi, who gives a terrific and sexy performance (now a MILF after co-starring as a youngster a decade-plus back opposite Ovidie the actress) as a would-be cougar, bedding down ultimately with mainstream porn star Phil Hollyday who she picks up one day in the park out on a hens' picnic with her pals.
One of these pals is the great actress (also turned director like Ovidie) Rebecca Lord, who is married to Bruno Sx, at age 50 suffering the usual crisis. His sexual plight becomes the film's central emphasis, and this is where the script goes completely off the rails in later reels -turning simultaneously predictable and phony.
It seems that Bruno's former mistress, lovely Graziella Diamond, has been watching Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction" one too many times, and she has taken to harassing both Bruno and Nomi now that he's ignoring her.
SPOILERS:
Ovidie's gimmick of Graziella pursuing Bruno's grown-up son Quentin (played by another mainstream porn star Ricky Mancini) and seducing him, so she can be invited "home to meet the folks" and truly embarrass Bruno in a poorly scripted and directed scene is terrible. It might work if this were light farce, and almost throws the already comic-touch feature into that camp. Resolution of the arrangement, with Quentin catching girlfriend Graziella on pop's lap after Q has just humped her, causing him to do an immediate 180 for story purposes is ridiculous.
Other couple is perhaps the film's weakest link, beyond the Graziella subplot. Playing his role very stiffly (pun intended), Pascal St. James has an open marriage with blonde Delfynn Delage, allowing him nooky every Thursday, no questions asked. He abuses the privilege and gets into hot water with wife. But the lovely, also blonde, prostitute played by Tania Ritz, gets to makes several pithy speeches criticizing Pascal's behavior, not totally out of character but rather obvious author's-mouthpiece insertions into the script. Even Nomi is stuck with such a recitation, when she tells the young lover Hollyday her rigid "no strings, no entanglements" one-night-stand philosophy.
So the situations and puppet-characters are ultimately and repeatedly undermined by the soap-boxing by Ovidie, an unfortunate trait. I admire her challenging any and all porn clichés (she won't include facials and puts anal sex back in the pornographer's tool box instead of its front & center status in Euro productions), but replacing that with preachiness is a very bad move.
Her later film "Pulsion" answers most of my objections and is highly recommended within Ovidie's oeuvre.
