Love Circles

I’ve got to hand it to the director Gerade Kikoine (who also directed the classic Frank and I) and the writer Harry Alan Towers (Black Venus, Frank and I, Christina, Warrior Queen). Imagine their pitch session to the bigwigs: “We have this idea for a movie with no plot, lots of sex, and you have to send us to Paris, Monaco, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, and New York to shoot it!” The creative team must have laughed all the way to a Swiss bank.

The plot is inspired by the Max Ophuls movie La Ronde from the 1950s. It follows a pack of cigarettes as it is passed from lover to lover across the world until it ends up back in the hands of its original owner. The implications of venereal disease are pretty clear to us in these times, but this was the tail end of the swinging 70s (actually 1984, but who’s counting?) so none of that matters. It’s all very lighthearted.

Since the film is a series of linked vignettes, the best way to approach it is to decide which ones are your favorite. Perhaps you enjoy Asian threesomes involving identical twin sisters with matching butterfly tattoos (they all look the same, right? Err, the tattoos I mean). Or perhaps you enjoy counting the ribs in Sophie Berger’s chest. Her first scene takes place in a bathroom in Monaco with a toilet that looks like a short, squat Roman column. The ridges (of the Ionic order) on the toilet pedestal pattern-match her ribs in a most appealing manner.

The scene with Jacqueline Josephine Jones annoys the crap out of me. Since she’s black, of course they dub in the sound of tigers over her, and African drums play in the background (ugh!). But if that’s not enough, it’s yet another example of my old nemesis, the sped-up sex scene. I hate them so much!

You’re probably going to go gaga for Lisa Allison’s scenes. Oh lordy, she is hot. What a body! But who is she? She has no other IMDb credits! A complete and total one-hit wonder, she looks like she wandered onto the set straight from the Miss America pageant. She can’t act a lick, of course. If you purchase or rent this DVD and you want to skip straight to her scenes, she first appears about an hour in, and her first nude scene comes at precisely 1:13:23. If you chose to do this, I wouldn’t blame you at all.

Private Screening Collection is in the process of releasing a number of the classic films from the Cinemax schedule back in the mid to late 1980s, and certainly Love Circles was on Cinemax enough back then that the film has its fans and followers. Some people have a great fondness for this film because it was their first introduction to softcore. But what if someone saw it today for the first time? Would it make an impression at all? Probably not. There is mainly nostalgia at work here. And also Lisa Allison, whoever and wherever she is.