Paris, France (1993): Lucy’s SM Memory and a Toronto Publishing House

Paris, France is a 1993 Canadian erotic comedy-drama, directed by Jerry Ciccoritti and written by Tom Walmsley. It opened in the United States in February 1995. For adult viewers the hook is Lucy trying to restage the sadomasochistic intensity of her days in Paris, while a small Toronto publishing house falls into bed-hopping. The film is not a dungeon manual.

Leslie Hope plays Lucy. She runs the house with her husband Michael (Victor Ertmanis) and their business partner William (Dan Lett). Sloan (Peter Outerbridge) breaks that stability. He is a former boxer turned writer, and the house is about to publish his first book, a story built around a serial killer. That is the plot of the book inside the film, not a set of methods. Sloan also hits the sexual hunger Lucy has been sitting on. Lucy is an erotic novelist herself. She wants a weekend of sex with him to break her block, and she wants the SM voltage she remembers from Paris.

Sloan is bisexual. After the affair with Lucy he starts a second one with William, who is openly gay, and that second affair scrambles Sloan’s own story about his orientation. Michael, hemmed in by his wife, his partner, and the client, stops merely watching or trying to manage the bed-hopping and joins it. Raoul Trujillo plays Minter. Patricia Ciccoritti is the voice of Lucy’s mother.

Variety called it a farce with few amusing moments and many boring ones. The San Francisco Chronicle said the sex goes as far as a non-pornographic film can go, and that the joke lands on the audience for sitting through it. The MPAA rated it NC-17 for explicit sexual content. It received two Genie Award nominations: Barry Stone for cinematography, Roushell Goldstein for editing. The record cited here is nominations, not wins.

Paris, France is not a rope documentary and not an SM procedural. Lucy’s remembered Paris scenes are the voltage she wants back in stalled erotic writing, and the plot uses that hunger against a marriage, a business partnership, and bisexual confusion. It sits with 1990s English-language erotic dramas that push characters with power-play memory and explicit sex. Catalog listings usually run through IMDb, Box Office Mojo, and Rotten Tomatoes.