Lasse Braun's first full length feature following a string of surreptitiously circulated loops revered by connoisseurs and collectors in the know - his PENETRATION a/k/a FRENCH BLUE was merely a collection of shorts offset by behind the scenes footage - remains the crowning achievement of his (in light of his reputation) remarkably checkered career, a prime example of the artistic style and wit that mark the finest of his fornication featurettes. Due to a short attention span perhaps, these traits rarely translated well to his 90 minute projects, most of which contain their fair share of sizzling sexual set-ups but also an all too generous amount of pseudo-philosophical self-indulgence that could only qualify as mental masturbation in the connecting footage. While the sex remains as scorching as ever, three or four decades down the line (cementing the late Jim Holliday's sacred statement that truly erotic sex never goes out of style), the director's soap box lamentations on the twin subjects of sexual freedom and the conceived conspiracies of state, religion and mass media to the suppression thereof have badly dated many of his movies in the meantime. To its credit, SENSATIONS contains fewer of these half-baked homilies than much of his subsequent work and anyway surrounds these mercifully brief interruptions with such a lot of lascivious fireworks as to successfully (if perhaps not wholly intentionally) drown out the director's dire diversion of discourse.
Loosely plotted along the lines of Alice in Wonderland, the prude heroine being an ignorant American (surely as close to a sheltered "innocent" as the worldly-wise Italian, whose real name's Alberto Ferro, could imagine) with an acid-fueled Amsterdam standing in for Carroll's mushroom-ingesting netherworld, swiftly scurries from one sublime sexual set-piece to the next once the stage is set. Making her way across the pond from London (no longer swinging now that the '60s had well and truly passed) to hot 'n' happening Amsterdam, ostensibly to meet her photographer boyfriend, naive Margaret from Minnesota (Braun's then girlfriend and muse Brigitte Maier) will get a lot more than she bargained for when she falls in with the cheese country's carnal crowd, cautiously clutching onto her beleaguered modesty like a prize commodity until ultimate surrender to the sins of the flesh set her free and literally allow her to "blend in" during film's oft-discussed quizzical final scene.
Fashions and general behavior may make for something of a time capsule but the constantly cooking carnality shot with a peeping tom's precision transcends such curatorial preciousness. Cult favorites Véronique Monet and Trixie Heinen, both of whom starred in the classic collaborative effort that was THE KINKY LADIES OF BOURBON STREET (ascribed to Didier-Philippe Gérard but with considerable creative input from both Claude Mulot and Francis Leroi), do the dressing room dyke thing that's a million miles removed from the routine mechanical "girl/girl" scenarios porn's littered with. Early French hardcore starlet Frédérique Barral, who worked for the idiosyncratic José Bénazéraf on LES DEUX GOUINES and THE RANDY WIDOW, plays Margaret's Dutch liaison Liza, donning the CLOCKWORK ORANGE cutaway dress as a prelude to seduction of one shot stud Pierre Latour.
Braun loop regulars Bent Rohweder and Claudio Rossi (from his ludicrously elaborate Casanova short included in PENETRATION) appear as Margaret's shutterbug fiancé and celebrated erotic painter Alonso Suarez respectively, the former romping with yin and yang exotic models Nicole Velna (black) and Eva Quang (Oriental) and the latter at the mercy of legendary British dominatrix Tuppy Owens as kinky Lady Pamela Weatherby. Sylvia Bourdon's Dutch poet sex slave Jan Wilton, whose ordeal was painstakingly detailed in Jean-François Davy's sulfurous EXHIBITION 2, leaves an indelible impression as the hook-handed manservant Arthur.
All of the casual kink merely serves as an entrée to the pornographic piece de resistance that is the gallery group grope with saucy septuagenarian Lord Weatherby (who else but Robert Leray, one time stand-in for Jean Gabin !) making a play for girls not half but probably just a quarter his age, including the Suarez offspring (a rare hardcore appearance for Jess Franco mainstay Tania Busselier) who subsequently performs an unspeakable act of kindness for overlooked admirer Jean-Claude Bertin, the rotund Lothario from Francis Leroi's LOOKING GOOD, currently excised from US prints but gloriously present on Alpha France's recent Region 2 DVD restoration as part of their superb Braun box set further incorporating PENETRATION, the Klaus Schulze-scored BODY LOVE and no less than 30 of his most notorious loops.
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