40 Ans, mariée mais libertine

Self-absorbed director Kendo hoists himself on his own petard in the BTS short subject of "Cathy 40", the fourth and probably last of his self- described "lustful housewives" series cranked out for French distributor Marc Dorcel. I vastly prefer the early, grittier videos the fetish-oriented filmmaker shot more than a decade earlier before he turned his stage name into a brand of sorts.

Problem here is what I like to refer to as an artist "getting too close to his material", rendering his resulting product hermetic and not audience- friendly. In Kendo's case, he has adapted quite practically to his distributors' fondness for pantomime, to the extreme that his footage emerges as either pointless or cryptic -take your pick.

The six sex scenes presented, as with the other 3 features in this series, make no sense whatsoever, merely depicting quite attractive and glamorously styled women humping. The homes are opulent but stark, decorated inhumanly and coldly. The men are always aloof, taking sang froid expressions to the extreme and seeming to condescend to their duties of putting on condoms and giving the ladies thorough but mechanical XXX workouts. If Entertainment were actually a continuum (sans borders) then Kendo would be the logical bird to hire to craft a sequel to "Ex Machina", substituting Dani Daniels for Oscar-winner Alicia Vikander.

It does make sense when you listen to Mr. Kendo himself proudly annotating each scene, explaining how he positioned each "model" (never calls these folks actors, players or anything else) right down to every movement and pose. No wonder the results are so lifeless and empty, with all humanity drained as surely as every scene ends in a cum shot (minus the lesbian encounters, of course).

The Cathy of the English title is Cathy Heaven, always a game trouper and servicing two guys at once as if it were second nature to her (I suppose by now it is, given the frequency with which she works and does such specialties). Her ability to make deep throat look effortless has likewise been demonstrated far too many times to be all that impressive.

One segment is telling: before humping a pretty girl removes her wedding ring. So Kendo informs us that this is the set-up to her being unfaithful - after all, his anti-storyline approach never establishes who she is or who the guy with her is, so we don't have much else to go on. He relates in the BTS a lengthy and boring anecdote full of repetitious detail on how he discovered on location in Hungary shooting this programmer that the custom there was to wear one's wedding ring on the other hand compared to Brits (or Americans). That is one huge example of the chasm between what this auteur finds interesting and what the viewers might find noteworthy.

The girls are quite beautiful, and besides Heaven we have a big star Tiffany Doll in tow, but even a modicum of story or characterization to keep the fans involved would be like a canteen of water proferred to a guy stuck wandering for days in the desert. No such luck -Kendo is a purist on that issue.