Sinner: The Secret Diary of a Nymphomaniac

Huh. Given everything I knew about Sinner: The Secret Diary of a Nymphomaniac (basically, its title and director), I expected it to be a lot worse.

The film is about the life and death of Linda Vargas. At the start of the film, Linda picks up a man from the strip club and implicates him for her own suicide. The man’s wife, Rosa investigates the case. Rosa learns from a woman named Maria that Linda moved to the city and was raped by Rosa’s husband. This made her afraid of sex until she met Countess Anna de Monterey who initiated her into the pleasures of lesbian sex. Linda eventually comes to enjoy sex with men also. Linda eventually takes on a free love attitude and frequently engages in sex work. She’s also briefly institutionalized to try and cure her nymphomania but a doctor forces himself on her so she returns to Maria, now with additional depression. Rosa also has sex with Maria while Maria is recounting these stories because that’s an appropriate time to do so.

Grading on the curve of Jess Franco movies, Sinner is by far one of his better ones. Still, that’s a pretty serious curve to grade on. Despite being an incredibly prolific director, most Franco movies are basically incompetent from a directing point of view. It feels like he actually tried with Sinner. There’s an actual mood, a coherent story, some level of characterization and the camera movement doesn’t feel full-on random. The music isn’t bad either, which is a rarity in a lot of 70s exploitation films. That Sinner isn’t overtly awful is an absolute win for Franco.

While I’m absolutely not going to call Sinner sex positive or feminist, it is also better than a lot of vintage softcore I’ve seen. Again, this is a pretty steep curve to be grading on. But a good portion of the sex scenes didn’t make me want to take a vow of chastity. Most of the sex scenes have Linda actually enjoying herself. So much of vintage softcore doesn’t have any interest in female pleasure and indeed often shows non consensual situations. In Sinner, the rape is off-camera and depicted as deeply unsettling and not sexy. So, the movie crosses the low bar of showing consensual sex and not depicting rape as sexy.

The movie also knows how lesbian sex works! Another low bar it crosses. The film features more lesbian sex than straight sex which was another pleasant surprise. Another surprise is the fact that there’s lines of dialogue about lesbian sex that shows the director actually knows how it works. Sinner also doesn’t condemn homosexuality. There’s a line in the film from Linda about how it’s a very foolish attitude to think all same-sex relationships are bad and all heterosexual relationship are fine. Again, there’s a lot of softcore stuff that wants to gaze at lesbians doing stuff but also condemns the lifestyle. Sinner at least steps over these various low bars other, similar films have stumbled on.

I can’t call Sinner: The Secret Diary of a Nymphomaniac good because I’m reviewing it as a film. And as a film, its plot and characters are weak and it’s too focused on sex. But of course it is! It’s a softcore porn. And as far as vintage softcore porns go, it’s one of the more decent ones. It has okay directing, some level of story and sex scenes which I can at least objectively understand why someone might find sexy. Sinner also doesn’t condemn homosexuality nor the character’s hypersexuality. It will objectify them, sure. But it doesn’t overtly shame these aspects or its sex-having female characters which makes it a better movie than most in the genre. As far as vintage softcore porn or especially as far as Jess Franco films go, you could to a lot worse.

Overall rating: 5.0/10

Other WLW films in similar categories