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Legionnaires
Rating: 3 Stars
Produced by Luis Hoyos. Directed by Jean-Marc Prouveur. Starring Giovanni Carreras, Kyzer Ross, Terry Costa-Brava, Jose Garcias, Chip, David Bury, Mario Lazarius, Mohamed Aoudini, Letta Jorna, Sam Griffiths, and Michael Prouveur.
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This Oh Man! International import is a hardcore stepchild of Claire Denis's homoerotic theatrical feature Beau travail, a film that transposes elements of Melville's Billy Budd, Foretopman into a tale of manly strife at a Foreign Legion outpost in Djibouti. Legionnaires is set in Morocco, a less godforsaken but similarly sun-blasted setting. Tough old officer Sam Griffith commands a garrison in the Atlas foothills. "The heat is intense," reads a passage from his journal. "The men cannot sleep properly.... They're getting restless. A new guy just arrived two days ago. He's called Giovanni. He's too smooth. The men are looking at him in a queer way...."

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Giovanni (Giovanni Carreras) is a slender, nut-brown morsel with a come-hither ladybug etched on his lower abdomen. He walks around naked a lot, oblivious to those queer looks. When he showers in the open air, everyone watches. Eventually he ends up bottoming for five (or six, depending on the shot) of his fellow legionnaires. This incident inspires Griffith to send Giovanni's admirers away on a course of wilderness survival training, and to keep Giovanni at the garrison "to toughen him up." This means lots of pushups and some unspecified, probably sexual, one-on-one abuse. (On camera, Griffith's erotic repertoire is restricted to meaningful stares.) Terrified by God-knows-what, Giovanni flees into the desert.

Director Jean-Marc Prouveur has worked to give this production texture and complexity. The physically varied, largely uncircumcised, international cast is first-rate. The sex could have been potent, but too much of it is poorly edited, fragmentary, and interrupted by fancy cross-cutting. The story, narrated by Griffith from a cell in Tahala Prison, is told in flashback. Just as we start getting involved in the sex taking place in the cell next to Griffith's, Prouveur cuts to the past; just as we're drawn into some recollected sexual escapade, Prouveur returns to the present, or cuts to something else. The two most successful sex episodes are an uninterrupted encounter between Mario Lazarius and Kyzer Ross on a rocky beach, and the prison lovemaking between Mohamed Aoudini and Letta Jorna--at least during the sustained final segment that carries them to climax. The on-location videography is superb; the uncredited quasi-Arabic music is superior to the average porn score.