Don’t Change Hands (Change Pas De Main) (1975) Severin Blu-ray Review

Verdict

2.5

Summary

Don’t Change Hands is a boundary-pushing surrealist thriller with tons of hardcore sex footage interweaved into the plot, making this a very unusual film to sit through. I “get” why Vecchiali thought adding real sex into his film would give his film the authenticity he felt he needed to make it authentic, but the reality is that the film is completely offset by its own excesses and ends up being a totally unnecessary film from a tonal perspective. It’s way too concerned with “going there” than actually going anywhere plot-wise, spending way too much time on hardcore scenes, inserts, and content that pushes the film into a whole different category.

Plot:

A politician is extorted for money when her son goes into porn.

Review:

A female politician on the cusp of a life-changing career move is sent a pornographic film that features her estranged adult son in the lead role, and this is supposed to scare her into paying the pornographers off so that the scandal doesn’t rock her campaign. Instead of paying the blackmailers, she hires a female private investigator to look into the film, find her son and the pornographers, and then settle the financial aspects of the exchange, as long as everything is in order, including getting negatives of the film and any peripheral evidence. The detective (played by Myriam Mezieres) starts at a sex club where the pornographers cherry pick relatives of famous people to extort by luring them into porn. When her first meeting with a go-between ends in a shootout, she then picks up a trail that leads her into her own depraved journey of self-discovery as she succumbs to temptation and takes on several lovers, culminating in an all-out orgy that climaxes in murder. When her client realizes that her son is a disgusting, depraved sex fiend himself (she watches another porno with him that shows him strangling a sex partner to death and then raping the corpse), the politician has no qualms in ending her relationship with her son … forever.

From filmmaker Paul Vecchiali, Don’t Change Hands is a boundary-pushing surrealist thriller with tons of hardcore sex footage interweaved into the plot, making this a very unusual film to sit through. I “get” why Vecchiali thought adding real sex into his film would give his film the authenticity he felt he needed to make it authentic, but the reality is that the film is completely offset by its own excesses and ends up being a totally unnecessary film from a tonal perspective. It’s way too concerned with “going there” than actually going anywhere plot-wise, spending way too much time on hardcore scenes, inserts, and content that pushes the film into a whole different category. It’s a shame, too, because the film might’ve ended up being a precursor to something such as Hardcore or 8mm, which both more or less follow a similar formula. As it is, though, the film won’t be accessible to mainstream audiences or even art house film purveyors with its gratuitous over the top content, but at least it’s different.

Severin recently released a Blu-ray edition of Don’t Change Hands in a sharp 2K scan, and it comes with some bonus features as well as a sturdy slipcover.

Bonus Materials