French novelist Michel Houellebecq has lost his legal attempt to stop a Dutch art collective issuing a film in which he has sex with several young women.

Judges in Amsterdam on Tuesday dismissed the controversial writer’s efforts to stop the film by the Kirac art collective after he claimed he consented to appear in the porn film to ‘counteract his gloom’.

According to the Guardian, Houellebecq and Kirac’s co-director Stefan Ruitenbeek discussed the plans in a series of emails last year. The aim was to make ‘a work of art, in which the distinction between fiction and reality takes shape as a game with the rancorous paranoia of your enemies’.

The writer also signed a release form agreeing to appear in the film, which said ‘the participant will be performing as a subject, for usage in artistic, fictional, documentary, performative, essayistic, erotic, pornographic films & Kirac episodes.’

The only restriction, according to the court documents, was that the film would not show his face and genitals in the same shot. Houellebecq walked out on the project before the end of the shoot at an Amsterdam hotel room after disagreements with the director.

The writer told the court he was suffering depression at the time of signing the deal and had drunk several glasses of wine.

Time

However, judges in Amsterdam found against him. ‘It is incomprehensible why [Houellebecq] participated in the recordings if he found the agreement to be really problematic,’ the judge said.

‘There was enough time between the time of the conclusion of the contract and the start of the recordings to return to the content of the agreement and, if that did not lead to a solution, to decide to refuse to cooperate.’

Earlier this month, judges in Paris rejected a complaint about the trailer, which Houellebecq argued damaged his private life and honour, as well as spreading lies about his wife.

Kirac, short for Keeping It Real Art Critics, hit the headlines earlier with a controversial film featuring far-right commentator Sid Lukkassen and his attempted seduction by ‘left-wing student’ and collective member Jini Jane.