– XXX is Celluloid Dimension’s latest weekly column featuring the hottest and naughtiest side of cinema. –
Directed by Claude Mulot
Written by Claude Mulot
Starring:
- Francis Lemonnier as Benoît
- Anne Libert as Isabelle
- Patrick Penn as Jean-Pierre
- Barbara Sommers as Sabine
Rating: 
I didn’t expect that messing with the idea of voyeurism, spawned from the sleaziest corners of exploitation cinema, would hit me with such wild thoughts about the essence of cinema itself. It’s one thing when exploitation gets artsy, but when it goes full pseudo-philosophical, that’s something else. Or maybe that’s just my inner film geek turning a smutty fever dream into theory after getting hooked on the deranged erotica of Sins of the Flesh by the French sleaze master himself, Claude Mulot. It’s hard to say if it matters, but damn, it’s something—whether it means anything or not is up for debate—but you can’t say this trippy carousel of sex and violence doesn’t have some twisted awareness of what movie-watching is really about. I get the sense Mulot wants us to buy that his slick, slow-burning sex scenes are just there to turn us on, not to make a statement about cinema. But porn or not, erotic filmmaking has its own strange poetry, its own goals that sometimes outgrow the simple business of lust.
Nobody’s fooled here. In Sins of the Flesh, Mulot’s not just pushing buttons—he’s posing as a full-blown provocateur. The guy knows exactly what he’s doing, riffing on Peeping Tom and turning his horny protagonist into a stand-in for every movie freak who’s ever stared too long at the screen. Watching and peeping, it’s all the same trip—and Mulot milks that connection until it feels like cinema itself is doing the voyeurism. You can call it an easy metaphor, but Benoit (Francis Lemonnier), the twitchy voyeur at the center of the mess, might as well be every cinephile caught in the act of watching. He’s the line where curiosity turns into craving. And Mulot’s scuzzy, fever-bright slice of Euro sleaze nails it perfectly—no analysis, no irony, just raw carnality doing the heavy lifting.
By all accounts, Benoit’s a lost cause: a lazy, horny voyeur living off daddy’s cash, a walking cliché of upper-class decay. He should be the kind of guy you root against—but he isn’t. There’s something too familiar in his boredom, too pathetic in his privilege. He’s not sympathetic, exactly, but he’s not detestable either—just another rich kid rotting from the inside out. The movie opens with Benoit getting torn apart by a naked college tease who laughs at him for not getting it up. Right there, Mulot flips the power dynamic—our “pervert” suddenly looks more like a wounded kid than a predator. His meaningless life unfolds piece by piece, until we start to see he’s just as lost as he is twisted. The whole story hangs on his obsession with watching, with finding pleasure through the lens. The touching part? That’s for Patrick Penn’s pretty-boy hustler and Anne Libert’s damaged girl. Benoit just watches, always watches.
It might sound like straight-up Eurotrash filth, but Claude Mulot isn’t just some smut peddler—he’s a visual stylist who turns lust into language. The sex between Patrick Penn and Anne Libert, seen through Benoit’s filthy yet curious gaze, becomes something strangely beautiful. Cunnilingus and fellatio splashed with psychedelic colors, gyrating bodies framed like moving pop art—every scene pulses with a warped sensuality that almost forgets how depraved it all is. It’s lust as cinema, cinema as self-discovery. The more he watches, the closer he gets to finding out what his desire really is. Keep trying new kinks, toss out the old, start again—that’s Benoit’s cycle. But every new thrill brings its own hangover. Sins of the Flesh eventually crosses the line where voyeurism becomes a hazard, where chasing desire means staring into the mouth of your own repression. What starts as pleasure ends up looking a lot like violence.
By the time Benoit hits the so-called “climax” of his self-discovery, the film plays it like a distasteful joke—except it’s too loaded to dismiss that easily. Sure, it’s “Benoit and the endless quest for a hard-on,” but Mulot turns that into a twisted cinematic confession. He turns Benoit’s erotic breakdown into a Hitchcock-style study in guilt and gaze—except sleazier, riskier, and way more self-aware. By the end, you realize he’s not just selling erotic shock, but pure perversion dressed as theory. The film’s got one of the wildest sex scenes French softcore ever birthed, and it all builds to one perfect truth: watching is wanting.
