La Soiree De Connes Review

La Soiree De Connes
JTC
Directed by Patrice Cabanel
Starring: Illona, Bamboo, Melissa, Alain L'yle, Bruno SX, Kevin Long
Running time: 1hr 17mins
Format: PAL/All Zones

Prior to watching this French language effort from Patrice Cabanel, I honestly wasn't aware that anyone was making movies like this anymore. With its resolutely low budget approach, La Soiree De Connes looks as crude as its title suggests, and at times makes those pirate VHS tapes of late eighties and early nineties Magma movies that I always ended up with look positively sophisticated.

The plot is simple - three friends pick up women, and then everyone gets together for the party. First, Kevin Long meets modestly attractive brunette Illona outside a peepshow/sex shop establishment. She seems utterly disinterested, both in his patter and in her own performance, as they chat back at his pad. The unbelievably unoriginal device of spilling a drink over her is used, not once but twice, to get her to strip to lingerie and stockings. Eventually she warms to him, though God knows why, and they get down to some sex - oral, vaginal and anal action leading to a come shot fired on her belly. Not too great, I am afraid. Illona really seemed to be going through the motions and the lack of technical proficiency in terms of light and camerawork is a notable distraction, with the latter at times so shaky that I hoped the cameraman would pop a Valium to settle his nerves.

I wonder if the tiresomely zany Alain L'yle (AKA Alain Poudesan) fancies himself as a porno Robin Williams, who he vaguely resembles, but thankfully his overacting features less strongly than sometimes in a scene where he picks up clueless hitchhiker Bamboo, a petite and quite attractive girl with an East Asian/French heritage. I wouldn't get in a car with him, love - you're likely to end up with his hand up your arse (she doesn't). They stop briefly to let her pee, which isn't actually shown, by the roadside. He can't keep his wandering hands to himself as they drive, before, for some inexplicable reason, the girl agrees to not only go to the lecher's house, but indeed to let him eat her pussy once there. She sucks his cock, and after some straight sex in a few positions, showing off her trim little body with natural small boobs (she acquired implants and tried her hand in the States some time after this movie was made), Alain gets his dick into her ass. He strokes himself off over her tight-lipped face to finish.

Focus switches back and forth between Alain and Bamboo's coupling and Bruno SX's encounter with a young brunette, Melissa, in a park. She all too quickly agrees to go with him and they head off to find some shelter for an outdoor fuck - the tree cover is way too light to disguise the copulating couple. He raises the skirt of her grey suit to reveal her thin little ass and eats her, she kneels to suck and then he takes her firmly in pussy and ass as she clings to a tree for support. The poor lighting makes the anal hard to see, but the camerawork is good enough to capture the spontaneity of the scene. Finally he blasts his come onto her tongue.

The three chums gather at a restaurant and relate tales of their encounters as they await the ladies' arrival. With the girls there, the static camerawork does nothing to alleviate the chore of sitting through too much dinner conversation, though not for the first time my limited French means the subtleties and nuances of the dialogue pass me by. What am I talking about - subtlety, in this movie? Come on! The upshot of it all is that the guys use a trick consisting of little trinkets hidden in a pie served for dessert, craftily ensuring the girls get them. This means they have to perform forfeits - Bamboo climbs onto the table to do a strip and then Melissa licks her pussy. Clearly Illona drew the short straw, because she has to suck Alain's cock.

Thus commences a mildly enjoyable little orgy scene - the gentlemen try all of the ladies and the energy level is reasonably high. There's even time for a little bit of highly unconvincing girl-girl tongue tangling before things become wearing. A montage of footage that we've already seen, a "highlights" package of sorts, is used to pad out a few minutes, with repeated shots of a cook smoking a cigarette while preparing food in the restaurant's unhygienic kitchen (he's got his dog in there, for Christ's sake!) spliced into the sex for no apparent reason. The come shots arrive at long last with a facial in turn for each girl - and that's it. Roll the credits. Fin.

Overall
The cast is hardly inspiring, the story is less than gripping, the camerawork is barely competent - it all adds up to make La Soiree De Connes a poor movie. The sex sparks up only sporadically, and some reasonably natural acting performances are scant compensation for sticking out a movie that seems a good deal longer than its 80 minutes. It has a grimy look that doesn't flatter the female performers, and while the gents are all reliable cocksmen of many years standing, I can safely say that no career as a teen heartthrob awaits any of them.

Perhaps I shouldn't be too hard on it, considering it was a free gift with a purchase from a certain French online vendor, but the flip side is that I simply can't recommend spending money on it. Perhaps director Cabanel, with whose works I am otherwise unfamiliar, was going for a certain raw style. Whatever the truth, my feelings are not favourable. Infrequently exciting, entirely forgettable.

DVD Comments
The picture quality is fairly rudimentary, though I guess the DVD authors only had some quite rough source footage to deal with. Weak colour probably contributes strongly to the grimy look that I mention above. The sound is quite inconsistent - perhaps the dialogue would have grabbed me more if it were clearer and not buried beneath the appalling music. And the music really is appalling - another feature of La Soiree… that's so reminiscent of dated European porn. In terms of the DVD package, the extras are of dubious value - a number of trailers do little to advance the cause of Patrice Cabanel's catalogue, the photo gallery is not impressive, and the chapter menu is the only other option. The sole audio track is French - no language or subtitle options are provided.