Les Bitches (2005) Online

Though not wholly successful, this serious soap opera from Paul Thomas is a fine example of what set him apart from the pack of lesser lights directing porn over the past few decades.

Shot on film (a 35mm camera is even visible in the BTS short subject), it looks and plays like a real movie and even has solid pacing with the requisite XXX scenes included. No abrupt halt "Time for porn" interludes by PT, but rather a careful integration of the sex action into the overall presentation.

It's about several women of the title, the shooting title having been just "Bitches" but when Thomas mentions his love for foreign films in the BTS it's clear that Chabrol's early New Waver "Les biches" is being referenced. Best acting is from Lezley Zen, a lady who is giving to flying off the handle, causing her to get fired from her job, precipitously give her boyfriend Dale DaBone his walking papers and even suddenly giving her new sugar daddy Nick Manning a hard time when he sets her up as a "kept woman" in an apartment she adamantly criticizes as being too small.

Dean Nash, who wrote perhaps PT's best movie "Bad Wives", has a solid script that interweaves the various characters imaginatively. DaBone does gardening for another insufferable lady (hence, they're "bitches") skilfully played by Roxanne Hall. Hall's hubby is smooth talking Alec Metro (almost as smooth as Manning, these two actors could have flipped a coin to switch their roles here), who of course ends up being cuckolded by DaBone, and gets his rocks off with their lovely blonde maid (from Europe) Sharon Wild.

The star of the show is Vivid contract girl Kira Kener, her huge natual breasts frequently dominating the frame. She also has sex with Manning, who is perhaps the most vain character of the bunch, criticized after humping for staring in the mirror during sex with her.

Nash's screenplay has its deeper elements, using the recurring mirrors and folks' narcissism as crucial plot elements. PT experiments successfully here by having an elaborate, meticulously cast, shot and edited sequence wherein Kener makes love to herself, and is represented in the mirror image by a doppelganger,plaued by Reina Leone, whose body (and particularly big breasts) carefully match Kener's.

Final reel has PT deftly and unexpectedly moving weeks or months into the future to show us what happened in the cast's relationships, though I found the abrupt ending, in porn tradition right after the final money shot, disappointing. But the movie still serves as an object lesson to today's "all-sex" porn directors that one can get characterizations and quite good acting out of a stone, or in this case a set of overworked sex goddesses and studs.