Felicia (1975) Poster

(1975)

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6/10
Schoolgirl shows adults the way
olp-15-61438931 May 2012
Rebecca Brooke was in Europe to film The Image, and stuck around to be in this Max Pecas film. Brooke, whose beauty in sex cinema is second to none, is a busy gal herein, but she gets a run for her money from Beatrice Harnois, her diminutive French co-star for whom this outing came in the middle of a brief career in hardcore. Harnois plays a young teen-ager (Felicia) who is sent by a relative to live with Brooke (Gabrielle) and her husband, played by Jean Roche (Paul), for the summer. It is never clear if this is the summer of Felicia's sexual awakening, or if she is already wide awake, but regardless, her self-appointed mission is to wake up anybody who moves. No one is safe around this kid.

First, Felicia warms up on herself as Paul and Gabby have a session in the kitchen downstairs on the day that Felicia arrives. On to two of fashion photographer Gabby's models whom she catches getting involved with each other in the dressing room after a shoot, and blackmails into letting her watch the full deal. Next she pounces on a lad about her age visiting with his parents for an outdoor barbecue. Gabby is next, in a moonlight tryst in the garden. Then Paul by the firelight, when Gabby is out of town on work. Finally, it's Gabby and Paul together in a bit of makeup sex since Gabby is none too pleased with Paul over his dalliance with Felicia, hers notwithstanding. Let's not gloss over Paul and Gabby's midnight romp al fresco after Felicia barges into their bedroom. I'll bet you didn't think you could do these things in a swimming pool.

In the film's final scene, after Paul and Gabby drop Felicia off at the airport for her flight home, they give a pretty young man a lift back into the city. The happy couple exchange glances which promise Gabby will be a well-used woman in the next few days. We're not sure which of the two is more eager to let the games begin, but her wry smile makes us think the Gabster can't wait to get home so the two guys can get started in on her.

There is plenty of real-time, honest on-screen oral sex performed by the stars, and a few hardcore inserts that look like they were done by body-doubles. Both Brooke and Harnois are naked all over the place, which is a good thing. All voices are dubbed, including Brooke, who is the only non-French actor, in a French melodramatic style that you had better overlook unless you want to spend the entire film in stitches. Other reviewers have commented on the lighting. When the action gets down to the good parts, things sometimes get shadowy and you can't always see the goodies. Pecas is too good of a director to have done that by accident. The background is classic French movie music, which elevates the film above its lowbrow nature. This is a decent semi-hardcore film with enough of a plot to keep you interested and actors who play their sex scenes without the theatrics that you would otherwise expect. It has the look of being made by a filmmaker, rather than by a sex director who threw scenes together. Recommended.
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7/10
Felicia
Scarecrow-8831 May 2010
Warning: Spoilers
After her mom has a nervous breakdown, a teenager(Béatrice Harnois)temporarily stays with a married couple and over the course of the movie seduces them. Jean Roche is Paul, a businessman, Rebecca Brooke is Gabrielle, a photographer. Felicia, experiencing a sexual awakening and completely open to trying anything which would fulfill her erotic charge, achieves what she sets out to do, first with Paul and the more reluctant Gabrielle. FELCIA is liberated French soft-core porn with three attractive leads. I particularly enjoy a good lesbian seduction and FELICIA provided exactly that. Felicia has to work at it to get Gabrielle to release her reservations and engage in pleasure..at first, it looks like Gabrielle is positively straight, no inkling of desire for Felicia whatsoever. The key to the great softcore scene when Gabrielle finally consents and gives Felicia oral pleasure is the build up. Gabrielle carefully maintains a barrier against Felicia's designs for her, with it slowly crumbling, until she can no longer resist. Director Max Pécas uses candlelight and other camera techniques to give the erotic sequences some extra potency. Felicia is so uninhibited and free with the idea of making love to the couple spotting her a summer refuge, and this place is perfect for such a plot regarding the methodical approach of sexual surrender. FELICIA includes such tawdry scenes as Felicia forcing two lesbian models to have sex with each other or else inform Gabrielle of their snooping around in her private things & Paul masturbating Felicia using his feet. The close has all three participating in a threesome where each member acknowledges their love for one another.
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9/10
Sizzling French erotic entry of a couple entangled with another
Linda_S24 February 2009
I did not give this a 10 due to lighting. How much of the problem with this print was due to American distributor: Excalibur I don't know but there is a break in the middle and inexplicable lighting problems which I doubt a talent of Max Pecas' abilities would overlook, yet it has happened before.

Deauville France is the setting and a charming country home. A 30 something married couple agree to have as a guest, depending on which description is accurate either:

1. the wife's niece or 2. a daughter of a friend of the wife

Beatrice Harnois plays the niece, friend's daughter and she is quite an actress.

One feels as if one is, indeed, peeking into the lives of a couple and their guest.

The delicious Mary Mendum, credited as "Rebecca Brooke," is sultry, stunning, and VERY hot playing the wife whose mind is played with by the Harnois character.

Jean Roche, PAUL, is exceptionally good and outshines many of the more highly regarded "straight" actors whether here(US) or Europe.

This is about a young woman who effectively controls a husband and wife.

Creating some real havoc and conflict along the way.

There is a happy resolution, at least to my view and overall a very erotic film.

As with so many of the early European pornos or erotiques there is genuine character development and storyline.

I might add that what the American distributors often do to these classics is butcher them. For what possible reason I cannot fathom.

America needs to liberate the artistic portrayal of sexuality and sensuality.

If you can find this film it is definitely worth viewing.
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Not that "perverse", but pretty erotic
lazarillo1 April 2010
I didn't try to count them, but I think the "Felicia" character in this movie has somewhat less than 1001 perversions. Actually, there are only a few "perversions" on display here, and they are very 70's, very French,and VERY male ones.

This the familiar story of an older but handsome man who has a beautiful wife (Rebecca Brooke), but is tempted by a younger girl, in this case the teenage daughter of his wife's friend who comes to stay with them (Beatrice Harnois, who looks like, but isn't, Leanora Fani). The twist here is that he is not initially interested in the sexually aggressive, petulant nubile (even though she spends about half the movie walking around their home stark naked), so SHE sets her sights on seducing the wife instead! But just to needlessly complicate matters, the guy is a schoolteacher who is being pursued by another scantily clad Lolita (played by an actress who looks like, but isn't, Annie Belle). This girl is one of his students and the niece of his colleague, who keeps bring her and her weird androgynous brother (who looks like, but isn't, the weird, androgynous kid from "Damned in Venice") to the couple's house. You would expect the whole thing would end in divorce, a lesbian conversion, and/or SOMEONE going to jail for corrupting a minor, but then this is a male fantasy above all else where there's nothing that can't be smoothed over by some hot three-way sex!

I've never seen Beatrice Harnois before, but I guess she was in the infamous French film "Pussy Talk", and she was obviously somewhat older than her character here (she actually doesn't look much younger than her "mother's friend"). Rebecca Brooke (aka Mary Medum) was actually an American actress and one of the prettiest girls to ever do hardcore porn (although her hardcore career was limited to a couple scenes in Radley Metzger's "The Image"). Besides her role as the nearly mute, submissive in that notorious S-and-M classic,, she is best known for a a pair of Joe Sarno softcore films "Confessions of an American Wife" and "Abigail Clayton is Back in Town". The French director of this, Max Pecas, had a long career in "Eurotica", but like Jean Rollin, Jose Benzeraf, and some others,he was largely put out of business by the advent of hardcore, a genre he was simply far too talented for. He may not have had a grasp on realistic characterizations or believable action and dialogue, but he really knew how to do some beautiful visuals. (There's one especially impressive scene where he photographs the main couple making love underwater at night in a lighted swimming pool). This movie is not that "perverse" actually, but it is pretty erotic.
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10/10
Bringing Up Béatrice
Nodriesrespect22 July 2012
Warning: Spoilers
Longtime admirers of each other's achievements, erotic entrepreneurs Max Pécas and Radley Metzger finally joined forces in 1975 with former funding latter's awesome adaptation of Catherine Robbe-Grillet's pseudonymous penned (as "Jean de Berg") S&M romance THE IMAGE through his Paris-based production facility Les Films du Griffon. In return, Metzger would loan out that film's luminous leading lady as well as girlfriend throughout most of the decade Mary Mendum a/k/a "Rebecca Brooke" for Max's own entrance into the explicit arena (times demanding...) with FELICIA. In France, where l'amour comes naturally, Pécas saw no need for a name change to take the pornographic plunge. Casting aside their repressive government in favor of a supposedly more liberal alternative unexpectedly clamping down the Continental adult industry with surplus taxes and stringent regulation, French fornication filmmakers enjoyed a brief breath of freedom as powers that be shifted between 1974-76 when just about everything seemed possible without the social stigma that was soon to become their part. For Pécas personally, this meant a grand total of two sexually graphic efforts, the other being the unapologetically single-minded LUXURE.

Apart from a perfect representation of people's perceptions about Europorn, FELICIA offers the sole explicit footage in existence actually performed (as opposed to body double inserts) by Joe Sarno's magnificent muse Mendum. Mesmerized by her elegant beauty, backed up by considerable thespian skill, a combo all too rare to squander, he was to feature her in five of his finest films. Rumors flew hard and fast as to what became of her after she had ended an otherwise exceptional career by appearing in questionable drive-in fodder, the most persistent perpetuated by erstwhile co-star Jamie Gillis claiming she had married a Muslim and converted to Islam, living a life of quiet obedience ! The truth, as usual, proved much more mundane. Happily wed into peaceful anonymity, she kept in touch with the Sarnos all these years and finally came out of hiding last year to provide an on-camera interview, looking relaxed and ravishing, for Seduction Cinema's DVD reissue of ABIGAIL LESLEY IS BACK IN TOWN.

As Metzger "lost" Mendum to Pécas, he (almost) gained all 5ft of Felicia herself, the formidable if fleeting Béatrice Harnois whose misgivings concerning her erotically explicit employment finally got the better of her, bowing out of MISTY BEETHOVEN at the last minute ! FELICIA remains as close to the respectability of "real" cinema she ever got, having been shot and widely shown soft-core on 35mm stock with 16mm insert footage seamlessly integrated for the more permissive picture palaces. Leading man Jean Roche pushed the envelope in terms of full frontal male nudity but refusing to go all the way. He called upon the services of a stunt double to accomplish his sexual performance, in this case Becky's IMAGE co-star Carl Parker.

Rare in adult, this hinges entirely on the thespian and carnal prowess of its three leads, additional characters appearing but peripherally to the film's plot, on the surface simply another rehash of sex cinema's staple story of the solid family unit disrupted, spiced up and subsequently reconciled by a manipulative interloper, in this case 14-year old Felicia (with Harnois convincingly looking the part, although 20 at the time) coming to stay with her aunt and uncle in the French seaside resort of Deauville while her mother recovers from a breakdown in some Swiss sanatorium. Fidgety on the film's age and blood tie issues, the English language version omits all references to the character's tender years and reduces Paul and Gabrielle to mere friends of the family ! He's a teacher, popular with and practically stalked by one of his nubile students (perky Nicole Daudet), and she's a photographer of partially clad cuties which excuses the presence of models Marlène Myller and Eva Khris around the house. Providing the best of the non star-related action, both starlets engage in Sapphic slurping at the behest of the blackmailing little brat who has caught them surreptitiously trying on Gaby's gaudy costume jewelery. The only other sex footage comes courtesy of baby-faced wannabe stud Ray Prevet (also in the perfunctory Les Monteuses by "Richard Stephen" a/k/a Dominique Goult who directed the troubled Killer Truck with Klaus Kinski and...Maria Schneider !) as Ronny who's about Felicia's age and every bit as clueless though claiming extensive experience.

Educational voyeurism and teenage fumbling can only take a girl so far, setting the scene for Paul and Gaby's initiation of their little niece...or is it the other way round ? The bulk of the narrative concerns Felicia's premeditated attempts at seducing her elders, alternating between clumsy (flashing her private bits) and sophisticated (feigning injury), picking up on Gabrielle's suppressed same sex attraction and taking advantage of Paul's frustration once their liaison literally leaves him the odd man out. Harnois's playful insouciance, reinforcing the impressions she's making up as she goes along, effectively takes the sting out of a character that could otherwise come across as conniving. Felicia may deserve a sound spanking (which she certainly receives, fear not !) but she basically remains an innocently curious Lolita venturing into territory subsequent political correctness would soon deem out of bounds. Building erotic tension with a master's hand, Max almost makes the cumulative pressure too much to bear. This aspect along with the production's overall classiness makes the film perfect for couples as long as neither partner's too freaked out by the underage insinuations that come with the intrigue. If nothing else, the lustrous lensing by Roger Fellous - the hardest working DoP in '70s French XXX films, for good reason - should go a long way to take the edge off, along with the soothing strains of a lush orchestral score by longtime Pécas collaborator Derry Hall. Very much a "real" film with all that entails in terms of plot, production and acting, Felicia solidly holds its ground as one of the finest European adult movies ever made.
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Great Max Pecas Movie
sleazoid_express18 May 2000
"Felicia" is one of Max Pecas' best movies. A happily married couple have their friend's pouty teenage daughter over for a few weeks in the summer. The girl teases, peeks, interrupts and taunts, and seduces. It's beautifully photographed and executed, hardcore but tasteful. Rebecca Brooke (Mary Mendum) and Beatrice Harnois are excellently ast.
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10/10
Let me count the ways.
morrison-dylan-fan5 December 2013
Warning: Spoilers
With having discovered feature film "Adult" titles for the first time this year, (thanks to stunning titles such as Through The Looking Glass)I felt that with the last month of the year just about to arrive,that it would be a good to end 2013 on an excellent sounding,perverse note.

The plot:

Being desperate to help out their neighbour,as she recovers from an illness in a Switzerland hospital,young couple Paul and Gabrielle decide to look after her 17 year old daughter Felicia,by allowing Felicia to stay with them in their country house for 6 weeks.

Picking up Feclica from the airport,Gabrielle and Paul are sadden to find,that instead of meeting the upbeat and lively teenager that they had expected, Felicia is in fact down beat,and extremely cynical.With currently taking photos for a calender,Gabrielle decides to make Felicia model for her,in the hope that it will help to "free" Felicia spirit.Whilst finding the modelling itself to be annoyingly stupid,Felica finds herself becoming increasingly attracted towards Gabrielle,which leads to Felica to begin planning ways that she can insert perversions into Paul and Gabrielle relationship.

View on the film:

Whilst some of the more…questionable moments in the movie would likely lead to a much different ending today, (with Felicia being arrested for being a sexual predator!) each of the cast members give tremendous performances,which help to make Paul,Gabrielle and Felica's fracturing relationships a joy to witness.

Showing Gabrielle and Paul to be a bickering "old" couple,Mary Mendum and Jean Roche each give terrific subtle performances,with the ravishing Mendum showing Gabrielle to be a free spirit who is oblivious to Felicia's dark,interior motives,whilst Roche shows Paul's love for Gabrielle gradually reach the suffice,as he beings to fear that Felicia is going to tear them apart.Spliced right in the middle of Paul and Gabrielle's relationship, the stunning Beatrice Harnois gives a wicked performance as Felicia,with Harnois allowing Felica's initially harden appearance to soften,and reveal a devilish smile of a snake,who is about to attack her prey.

Avoiding the easy opportunity of turning the movie into a sleaze fest,the screenplay by co-writer/ (along with Michele Ressi-who also edited the film)director Max Pecas, (whose dad Marc did second unit work for the title) instead roots itself in the drama of Gabrielle and Paul's crumbling relationship,which along with making the viewer actually care about the effect that Felica is having on their relationship,also gives the more intimate moments in the film a highly erotic charge.

For the films eye catching,stylised appearance,Pecas uses the couple's country house setting to cover the movie in warm greens,browns and yellows,which along with creating a mood of the house being placed right in the middle of the wilderness,also gives the more "Adult" moments in the title an extraordinary sensual atmosphere,as Pecas begins to reveal how perverse Felicia's 1001 perversions are.
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10/10
The best of Rebecca
steveiltep22 January 2016
It's taken me a long time but I'm glad I persevered and finally procured a DVDs of this title. The origin is Italy and comes with two options, soft and hard. The soft option has no English soundtrack but the hard one does. Now I've been a fan of Rebecca Brooke for some years now and have gradually building up a collection of her work. I love her Joe Sarno stuff, especially "Abigail Lesley is back in town" and "Confessions of a Young American Housewife" where, although not explicit, she and her co-stars are believed to have had full sex on the shoot. On Metzer's "The Image" she went a stage further and dabbled in some hardcore. But believe me that's lightweight compared to this title. Rebecca and Beatrice Harnois really go for it from the get go in what is probably right up there with the best in this genre. The only down side is poor lighting in a couple of scenes which I'm assuming was deliberate. Probably sourced from VHS but if you want to see the best of Rebecca hardcore it doesn't get better than this!
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