If France’s major contribution to the world of erotica was Emmanuelle, before Catherine Breillat unleashed her full-frontal assaults on the senses, Australia’s answer was Felicity. Not much of an answer, actually.
Director John D. Lamond’s movie is a limp exercise in soft-core porn, the umpteenth iteration of a girl’s sexual awakening. Felicity (little-known Canadian actress Glory Annen, affecting an English accent) is a schoolgirl who yearns for her first sexual experience, not counting a lesbian encounter with one of her boarding school friends.
Felicity gets her chance, well, multiple chances, when her unseen father offers her a trip to Hong Kong to stay with her aunt and her husband. There, she’s deflowered on the bonnet of a car by a boorish guy she’s just met, a borderline rape; she’s befriended by Me Ling (model Joni Flynn, whose only other claim to movie fame was playing a Bond girl in 1983’s Octopussy), who escorts her to a floating brothel where she’s pleasured by some of the working girls and later taken from behind by a stranger. Eventually she meets Aussie expat Miles (Chris Milne), and the randy couple are soon having sex on a bus, in a lift and at a sex cinema.
Is any of this romantic or even remotely sexy? Not in the least. Glory mostly looks uncomfortable, especially saddled with profound lines like 'My nipples hardened""¦. 'Let’s get into the prawns""¦.and 'Miles, I feel so horny." No writer is credited, but the stilted dialogue and clunky narrative have Lamond’s paws all over it. John-Michael Howson as a gay couturier in Hong Kong is truly wince-making, and the thin plot is padded out with travelogue scenes.
Rarely has Hong Kong looked so dull.
