In the last couple of years or so Liselle Bailey has made better & better Adult romances for Marc Dorcel, culminating in this miniature classic. Though I fear not being taken seriously (you have to watch the film to understand), I must intone mainstream giants like Robert Bresson and Agnes Varda to describe Bailey's achievement in that shunned modern genre called pornography.
Casting is crucial and in redhead beauty Ella Hughes the auteur has found an ideal subject for this austere and severe study of a compulsive personality. Ella has OCD and balances a strange existence of shy accountant by day and risk-taking hedonistic libertine by night, the Sex Addict of the title.
Her character doesn't develop over the course of the feature. as we witness more of a slice of her life. Though Liselle is British and shoots in English in the UK for the premiere French porn label Dorcel, I couldn't help thinking of the precision of many a Bresson movie or from Varda's ouevre "Cleo from 5 to 7". Hughes, her name in the credits made into pidgin French as "Hugues", is a riveting presence and the supporting cast including the lovely Dorcel contract star Cara Saint-Germain as her BFF are not permitted to upstage her during the requisite series of sex vignettes.
Using voice-over narration well, in the adopted Dorcel style (Ella has only one line of dialog), Bailey's minimalism is most impressive and weaves a spell that will hopefully be appreciated by Dorcel fans. Editing is shared by both her team and the Dorcel unit back in Paris, resulting in the cryptic omission of an interracial sex scene between Ella and Black actor Dru Hermes in a bathroom stall at the bar where she nightly goes to pick up men (or on "dates"), with the explicit staging shown only in the DVD's useful "Making of" short subject.
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