I Am a Nymphomanic (1971) Max Pecas

Country: France |Director: Max Pecas

Paul and Gabrielle, a young married couple, take in their neighbor's teenage daughter, Felicia, for a few weeks in the summer. It isn't long before the precocious and seductive Felicia sets her sights on the two of them.

This is the touching story of a provincial French girl (Sandra Julien) who, after an accidental fall down an elevator shaft, discovers that she is (gasp!)a nymphomaniac. She loses her fiancé, gets fired from her job, is kicked out of the house by her parents, and has to leave her small town for big, bad Paris where she falls under the spell of an older predatory pair of libertines (Janine Reynaud and Michael Lemoine).

It's hard to know what to make of this movie. With the crappy English dubbing it seems a lot like those ridiculous 16 mm. black-and-white Harry Novak-type sexploitation movies they were making in America in the 1960's and 1970's. However, visually the film is very well-made and it features sumptuous European actresses like Jean Rollin's regular Julien and Jess Franco regular Reynaud (rather than the pimply anonymous Times Square skanks that were in the American sexploitation movies of the era). Perhaps it is a more serious and classy production than the atrocious English soundtrack would leave you to believe.

In any case, I don't think this movie was exactly meant to be a serious exploration of nymphomania so much as an excuse for a lot of nudity and softcore sex by the aforementioned Julien and Reynaud. Nothing wrong with that though. The girls in these type of movies have always been male fantasy figures, but these ridiculous pre-feminist European fantasy figures of days gone by are definitely more interesting than the equally ridiculous but much more jaded, post-feminist fantasy figures of today.