`Delta Of Venus' Destined To Become A Campy Classic

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X 1/2 "Delta of Venus," with Audie England, Costas Mandylor, Rory Campbell, Emma Moore. Directed by Zalman King, from a script by Elisa Rothstein and Patricia Louisianna Knop. Grand Illusion. "NC-17" - No one under 17 admitted.

Anais Nin's "Delta of Venus," a collection of erotica published in 1977, the year of her death, is not as widely read as her seven volumes of diaries.

Nor is it as famous as Philip Kaufman's 1990 movie drawn from the diaries "Henry & June," in which Maria de Medeiros played Nin as a voyeuristic aesthete.

Some reference books don't even mention "Delta" as part of Nin's voluminous output. Now that it's a Zalman King movie, alas, it's likely to become infamous as the basis for an art-house camp classic.

King's long list of soft-core moneymakers includes "Two-Moon Junction," "Wild Orchid," "9 1/2 Weeks" and cable television's "Red Shoe Diaries," most of them drenched in gauzy photography, unlikely sexual situations and even unlikelier dialogue. "Delta of Venus" is more of the same.

Filmed in Prague but set in France shortly before the Nazi invasion, the movie stars Audie England, who made her professional acting debut in "Red Shoe Diaries," as a young American writer named Elena, who joins a smart bohemian set of artists, writers and bisexuals.

She immediately falls for another American in Paris: the impossibly cool, worldly and handsome novelist, Lawrence, played by Costas Mandylor ("Picket Fences," "Mobsters"), who catches her eye when he's rowing down the Seine. He sweeps her off her feet, appears to dump her, then flees Paris.

She spends months trying to get over the affair, then faces a financial crisis that lands her in a life-drawing class where she is forced to pose nude. She also writes erotica for cash, for a demanding and anonymous collector who feels that "the language of sex has yet to be written." He inspires Elena to try a series of sexual experimentations, including a visit with a clairvoyant, "a big man from West Africa," who strips and makes love to her while advising her on the "man who makes you suffer."

Also part of her new sexual repertoire: watching a woman who has sex only with blindfolded strangers in front of her husband because "her only pleasure comes from being watched."

King steadfastly follows the rules of soft-core porn: pretty people, minimal character development, no male frontal nudity, no male-male sex but plenty of female nudity and lesbian three-way sex.

The actors babble endlessly about "potential" and "spirit" and "vague, poetic cravings." We learn of one character that "He yearns, he reads and he dreams." They're supposed to be talking about their art, but it all comes out as barely suppressed lust. When the Nazis finally do take over, they're just a photogenic inconvenience, a threat to the parade of kinky liaisons.

Possibly "Delta of Venus" wouldn't encourage so many giggles if it were dubbed in French and presented with English subtitles. But who wants to suppress the giggles? They're almost the only entertainment value in this 100-minute fiasco.