Pussy Talk

While Gerard Damiano’s mafia financed and distributed crossover work Deep Throat (1972) brought mainstream legitimacy to pornography in the United States, the French were treated to something much more bizarre in terms of pioneering crossover porn flicks. Indeed, Claude Mulot’s Pussy Talk (1975) aka Le sexe qui parle aka Talk aka The Sex Who Talks—the first frog fuck flick to achieve international success and eventually earn cult status—is as wantonly whacked out as its rather literal American English title would suggest, as a patently preposterous porno piece featuring a chattering bushy pussy that likes to use the word “cunt.” Rather loosely based on the French 18th-century erotic novel The Indiscreet Jewels (1748) aka Les bijoux indiscrets by Enlightenment era writer Denis Diderot, Mulot’s flick is what some viewers might describe as a sub-arthouse unintentional laugh-out-loud comedy as a dead serious work with majorly moronic dialogue and scenarios that would baffle even an autistic toddler in terms of its absurdist erotic anti-realism. Sort of like a Radley Metzger film (in fact, Pussy Talk can be seen being advertised on a movie theater marquee in Metzger’s hardcore masterpiece Opening of Misty Beethoven) meets a preposterous premise from some old vintage Nickelodeon cartoon, Mulot’s masterfully moronic yet lavishly lecherous blue movie may be a lot of things that one might describe as unflattering, but no one can say the film is in any way, shape, or form banal. Featuring ‘actresses’ that are far too attractive to be porn stars and mostly physically and psychologically male characters that are more often than not intimidated by beauteous women that probably would not normally recognize their rather mundane existences, the film’s American distributor certainly used false advertising with the following rather ridiculous tagline: “Because you're a Woman, you should see...Pussy Talk.” A sort of raunchy ‘gynocentric’ reworking of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that may or may not have influenced the rather wretched feminist vomit The Vagina Monologues, Pussy Talk is a salacious sick joke at the expense of both men and women that reminds the viewer that pussies have many secrets and complaints to tell.

Joëlle (Pénélope Lamour) is a statuesque redhead who is married to a less than sexually virile fellow named Eric (Jean-Loup Philippe), so she must find other ways to satisfy her sexual cravings aside from being soullessly humped by her hubby. When a hot blonde compliments her act of defiance regarding tearing up a traffic ticket that has been left on her car, Joëlle follows the sensual stranger into a record shop, fondles her vulnerable vulva, and attempts to shove a 100 French franc banknote in the woman’s pussy, but the two are ultimately interrupted, thus prematurely aborting the game of ‘cash-in-gash.’ The next day while she is at work, Joëlle, who is an executive at an advertising agency, uses her seductive power as a busty boss to pull out a startled young mensch’s cock and begin deepthroating it. When Joëlle comes home that night, she has to keep company with her husband Eric’s banal friends, so to spice things up, she begins masturbating in front of them. While Eric is somewhat angered by his wife’s vulgar display, it also turns him on, so the two have sex, though Joëlle is ultimately left unsatisfied. Needless to say, Joëlle decides to satisfy herself by masturbating in a bathtub while fantasizing about a group of male frogs in a circle jerk busting their loads on the windshield and windows of a car she is inside. After diddling her naughty bits, Joëlle notices her husband and also notices that her cunt has began talk in a crude fashion.

When Joëlle walks in on her snoozing husband, her mouthy meat-curtain rudely awakens him by stating: “Well, as I live and breathe…isn’t it sleeping beauty? Wakeup you lazy son-of-a-bitch! You hear me? I said wakeup! I wanna fuck…you understand? FUCK! Only, this time I wanna get something out of it. I want you to sock it to me kid […] You better get used to it! You both better get used to it because when I get going, I’m Pandora’s Box without a lid.” Indeed, Joëlle’s pussy is now in charge and it has a voracious yet eclectic appetite, so before the ad executive knows it, she is walking to a porn theater in nothing but a trench coat. Upon entering the sleazy porn theatre and watching a fucked fuck film featuring a deranged dude cutting off a poor girl’s bodice and subsequently raping her, Joëlle begins giving two swarthy frogs with flaccid chodes handjobs at the same time, but her efforts do little to get the men’s dongs up, so the threesome heads to the theater bathroom and gets involved in a claustrophobic ménage à trios. Needless to say, Eric is not happy later that night when Joëlle goes home and her blabbering beaver tells him what his wife has done at the local porn theater. The next day, Eric has his friend Martine (Ellen Earl)—a psychiatrist posing as a veterinarian “with an interest in pussies”—come over to meet Joëlle, whose talking pussy the quack naturally wants to meet. Of course, the chattering cunt, which semi-sinisterly states to the psychiatrist, “You wanna know, cunt?! […] the four of us are going to have a blast,” is too smart for Martine and coerces her to have sex with not only Eric, but Joëlle as well. Of course, minor trouble strikes Joëlle and Eric when Martine decides to go to the press with the story of the “vagina loquens.”

Hoping to get the full scoop on Joëlle and get her surreally sordid story, Richard (Vicky Messica) approaches the ad executive’s absurdly amorous artist aunt Barbara (played by French ‘activist’ Sylvia Bourdon)—a playfully perverted lady who regularly enjoys threesomes with both her male and female subjects—who is more than willing to setup up her niece for the right price. Meanwhile, after Joëlle falls asleep, her compulsively chit chatty cunt tells her husband about her sexual awakening as a teenager. Indeed, on top of revealing that Joëlle’s mother shot her stepfather dead when she was 16 after catching her husband molesting her daughter, Eric also learns that his wanton wife lost her virginity to the nose of a Pinocchio marionette after her high school sweetheart pussied out when it came to deflowering her. Eric also learns that Joëlle was quite the little sadist seducer when she was a teen, as she and her friend managed to molest their high school teacher, not to mention the fact that she fucked a priest after confessing to him. Rather shocked by all these stories, Eric is only all the more emasculated when the cunty cunt viciously states: “You don’t understand anything. She was so vibrant, so full of life…you’ve turned her into a frigid old woman. There’s a cunt issue…You act like a cunt, you work like a cunt, and you fuck like a cunt. Why she married you, I’ll never know.” After the cunt gets down spewing vile, yellow journalist Richard and his comrade break into Joëlle and Eric’s room while they are naked in bed. While Joëlle manages to escape while Eric beats up the jack-off journalists while he is in the bare, the chick with the chattering cunt makes the mistake of heading to her deceitful aunt’s house. After aunt Barbara drugs Joëlle, Robert comes by and starts masturbating the meaty talking pussy with a microphone, thus getting the sordid story he needs. While Eric later manages to silence his wife’s vagina by finally managing to sexually pleasure her with his cock, the hubby’s member becomes infected with the speaking genital STD in what is a rather predictable, if not pleasantly perverse, twist ending.

Apparently, the “talking cunt” (or, as the frogs call it, the “vagina loquens”) is nothing new in France, as it is an ancient folklore motif dating back to at least the 13the century, as demonstrated by the ‘fabliau’ (comical tales written by frog bards) ‘Le Chevalier qui faisoit parler les cons et les culs.’ Indeed, in the allegorical 1748 novel that Talking Pussy is based on, The Indiscreet Jewels aka Les bijoux indiscrets, French King Louis XV is depicted as sultan Mangogul of the Congo and has the power to make women’s “jewels” talk with a magic ring. Somewhat notably, Talking Pussy was such a hit that it spawned a sequel, Triples Introductions (1978), as well as an intentional comedic and thus innately inferior non-pornographic English remake entitled Chatterbox (1977) aka Virginia the Talking Vagina directed by gay pornography to exploitation auteur Tom DeSimone (Hell Night, Reform School Girls). As Talking Pussy demonstrates, the French were no less chic when it came to porn chic, but France’s socialist taxes destroyed the frog fuck film industry before it really began. Indeed, the immaculately titled work is certainly more honest and no less artful that contemporary frog pseudo-arthouse works like Christophe Honoré's banal Bataille adaptation Ma mère (2004) and slave-driving pseudo-Frenchman Abdellatif Kechiche's pseudo-Sapphic epic of counterfeit crypto-pornographic carpet-munching Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013) aka La vie d'Adèle. 

-Ty E