(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

Watch the whole programme - 19 April 2002

MARK LAWSON:
The Pornographer, the first of our dirty double tonight. Tom Paulin, there has been complaints that they took 12 seconds out of this. There are 110 minutes and 35 seconds left. Did you enjoy them?

TOM PAULIN:
No, I've never seen a pornographic film before. I can't say it was interesting. But I thought even so, banned as it is, isn't it an interesting example of what we have been talking about, the various French films we have reviewed.

The extraordinary emptiness that there seems to be in France at the present moment.

Look at what is happening to Jospin. The feeling that this is a culture, a country. I mean, a great nation on the brink of total chaos with a total moral void there.

This film expresses that moral void, though not intelligently.

MARK LAWSON:
They're in fact, I suspect, from what I once saw in a motel room, they were trying to be less empty, trying to have a plot, trying to have a moral. Trying to show us the disgust, the journey of this man. Did any of that come across?

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
No, but curiously, I thought it was an idea, a very interesting idea. It takes you to the time of the end of the '60s and '70s when making pornography was a radical thing to.

Like the Suck Festival in Amsterdam where everyone from Germaine Greer would go and it was making a big statement.

Now it's interesting that you have the set up of his son, which I thought was quite a good little scene. They don't know what to rebel about. All they can think of doing is being silent.

I went to sleep the first time I tried to watch it. I struggled with it again. It was desperately boring. And really dull and really empty. It was as though they were trying to have their cake and eat it too.

They were saying pornography is boring but gave you these dominatrix ladies who strutted around taking their clothes of and giving blow jobs.

TOM PAULIN:
Isn't it like what happened in this country in the '70s where people were saying "What was it like to be around in the '60s?" The French had just caught up with this now, it seems. Where are they now?

MARK LAWSON:
I think it is a much more central event for them.

RACHEL HOLMES:
I agree with Rosie. I wish they'd left in the 18 seconds and cut the other hour and 15 minutes. It was utterly boring.

I was so relieved when it was over. A bored pornographer who has made a lot of money, a white man having a middle-aged crisis. I couldn't get interested in it.

MARK LAWSON:
Can you get interested in this? As all our grandmothers said no use crying over spilled DNA. Does it matter, this fuss they are making about it? They've put a board on the front of the film saying "Our film has been butchered".

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
What about that film, There's Something About Mary, where she puts that cum in her hair? But of course it is plastic, it's a fake and we are allowed to see this. It is a trivial cut.

MARK LAWSON:
The people are not going to the barricades for the 12 seconds.

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
No, but it is not worth seeing it with or without the 12 seconds.