Recently released on a Code Red triple bill of early James Bryan soft core efforts, 1974's obscure I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU NOT also marks the only one of these three not also issued by smut streaming impresarios Exploitation.TV, leaving it doubly maligned in its move to the digital realm. The film's grouping with Bryan's other early soft-Xers ESCAPE TO PASSION and DIRTIEST GAME IN THE WORLD proves fortuitous, however, as the three form an interesting snapshot of the early development of one of sleaze cinema's wonkiest auteurs.
Like its antecedent co-features, LOVE YOU is a verite sex flick in the free-and-loose style of early '70s. Heavily improvised, it chronicles the sexual exploits of unhappily married Lynn, whose husband, Frank, has just returned from a tour of duty in Vietnam. Either desperately lonely while he was away or presuming her husband dead, Lynn has been busy filling his (and her) void with an ever- changing roster of steady partners and pickups, including a high- powered industrialist piece-on-the-side (himself cheating on his harping shrew of a wife) and gaggles of men sourced from the surrounding streets and local bars. Alas, sexually impotent Frank can't do much to fill the vacuum upon his return, and the two become locked in a death-spiral of resentment and recrimination that inevitably builds to bloodshed.
If all this sounds pretty heady (and not to mention bleak) for a soft core skin flick, it certainly is, though unfortunately the synopsis also makes it sound like there's much more going on. While the idea of a broken marriage slowly flinging itself apart isn't new to the soft (or hard) sexploitation world, Bryan fails his subject through a lack of narrative drive and well-defined characters. While the improvisatory vibe plays well for the first 20 or 30 minutes, endless scenes of naked hippies running around squalid Venice apartments while imitating Donald Duck eventually grow wearisome when it becomes clear there's no larger emotional core to the production. Despite a near-endless stream of these fly-on-the-wall shenanigans, the main character of Lynn remains essentially a cipher, feeling generically "bad" for reasons never well defined and attempting to salve her pain through the endless repetition of sex. '60s sexploitation queen Marsha Jordan pops up for a couple scenes as Lynn's mother in an attempt to add some dime-store psychology, but her role is unfortunately limited to something approximating a '70s version of mother Claudette in Tommy Wiseau's THE ROOM: she harps on her daughter to get her emotional act together, daughter responds that she's going to do what she wants and storms out. Repeat as necessary. (Jordan does at least go the extra mile by getting it on with her daughter's frustrated hubby, however.)
What this film (along with its DVD companions) does reveal is Bryan's notable stylistic dexterity in embracing many of the key tropes of the Hollywood New Wave. They're all here: "naturalistic" improvisation, expressive montages set to well-selected folk and rock tunes, great location photography of early '70s Venice, and the general feeling that the viewer is watching less a film than a document, which skillfully and vibrantly captures the feel of the era and does prove quite engaging in small doses. With a tighter degree of control over his characters and narrative, Bryan could have had a minor masterpiece on his hands, and LOVE YOU leaves the viewer wondering what might have become of him had he persisted along these naturalistic lines rather than veering into the hardcore stupidity of DON'T GO IN THE WOODS (still possibly his best film) and EXECUTIONER PART 2 (a prime contender for his worst).
