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Insatiable
Rating: 3 Stars
Centaur Films. Produced and directed by Jean Daniel Cadinot. Starring Rodolphe Vernier, Melvin Dito, Emerick Toncka, Vladimir Sartori, Antoine de Mezieres, Yan Vanneck, Marek Wyzynski, Christiano Erdei, Elio Hatvan, Lucien Lebrun, Morgan, Bernard Desirade, and Fernando Leone.
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The work of French director Jean-Daniel Cadinot, one of the world's finest creators of gay sex films, has been in distribution limbo in the U.S. for several years. Now Centaur Films, the production company of L.A. porn entrepreneur Chip Daniels, has formed a partnership with Cadinot that is supposed to make his more recent output available to American audiences. This is a mixed blessing. If the atrociously dubbed Insatiable is any indication, Cadinot's work will now reach us only after programmed vandalism.

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Insatiable is disappointing in several respects. Cadinot, who stubbornly went on shooting film when everyone else in porn had dropped it for video, has moved on to videotape with uneven results. The difference in texture and resolution makes the images seem colder and stagier than those in his classic '80s films. Insatiable revisits themes of fidelity, freedom and possessiveness that Cadinot explored more effectively in L'amour jaloux (1989, released in the U.S. as Getting Even).

But even flawed Cadinot is obligatory viewing. Insatiable remains eminently worth seeing for the sex-- which is, after all, its raison d'ętre. The story involves a dancer (Rodolphe Vernier) at a Parisian club called Le Baise Ball, his lover (Emerick Toncka), and his lover's ex-boyfriend (Melvin Dito), who has just completed his military service and returned to complicate Vernier and Toncka's lives. The nine sex scenes crackle with lust. In the best sequence, Vernier and the remarkable Fernando Leone participate in a five-man encounter that seems to emit heat lightning. Chip Daniels, who perpetrated the English dubbing and takes credit for "additional dialogue," has at least refrained from tampering with the soundtrack during the sexual passages.

Up until now, most U.S. editions of Cadinot's films have been subtitled. Here, we're subjected to ersatz American banter read with disco-bunny intonations by the cast of the L.A. musical review Naked Boys Singing. Does Daniels really believe that George Duroy's Czech videos or Kristen Bjorn's international productions would be improved by dubbing that makes the actors sound like characters in U.S. prints of Mothra? Does he assume that most of the audience for porn won't read subtitles or simply can't read? It isn't only that the actors, whose mouths don't form the words they're supposed to be speaking, sound ventriloquial. It's that they're robbed of the French identity that is a key aspect of their allure. The porn world is rife with people who tend to misspell their own pseudonyms, true-- but is there really no one out there who can translate French into English and spell the result?