A young women getting ready to enter the university is depressed over her unsatisfying sexual experiences with boys her age and is unable to follow the path of her free-spirited, bed-hopping best friend. She becomes enamored with an erotic book called "L'Initiation" and has a chance to meet the married French writer when he comes to her university. Much May-to-December softcore sex ensues.
This is French-Canadian director Denis Leroux's color follow-up to his first "maple syrup porn" film "Valerie" and it pretty much has the same strengths and weaknesses of his earlier black and white effort. It looks pretty good and the girls are very attractive (I was obviously born 15 years too late and too far south). Danielle Oiumet, the lead in "Valerie",this time has the supporting role as the promiscuous friend and again shows no indication of the wretched performance she would give in her most famous film "Daughter of Darkness" (she's quite good actually). Best of all, the film is pretty classy--it has the class, if not necessarily the intelligence, of Radley Metzger films, and it's visually much more appealing than the sleazy, pimply, sweaty grindhouse crap they were making south of the (Canadian) border at the time. The story is told from the girl's perspective, but it avoids the old feminist saw where the young girl is impossibly naive and the married, older man is a moustache-twirling villain whose only motive for having the affair is casual sex (and apparently being too cheap to get a hooker).
Unfortunately though, there's generally a lack of character development period. And the movie has the same unbelievable fairy tale ending as "Valerie" where nothing is resolved so as not to let reality intrude on the male sex fantasy. And the general lack of anything very dramatic happening may actually make some long for the pimples-and-pathos of the Harry Novak-era American softcore films (or better yet the butter-and-pathos of the more famous older man/younger woman film "Last Tango in Paris") It's really a matter of your personal taste I guess.
