Successive Slidings of Pleasure (1974)

 

Director: Alain Robbe-Grillet

Screenplay: Alain Robbe-Grillet

Cast: Anicée Alvina as The Prisoner; Olga Georges-Picot as Nora; Michael Lonsdale as The Judge; Jean Martin as The Priest; Marianne Eggerickx as Claudia; Claude Marcault as Soeur Julia; Maxence Mailfort as Client / Customer; Nathalie Zeiger as Sister Maria; Bob Wade as Fossoyeur / Gravedigger; Jean-Louis Trintignant as The police Lieutenant

An Abstract Candidate

 

Maybe you ate some glass.

Broken egg yolks, a red liquid visibly evoking blood and broken glass intermingle amidst the opening sots of Successive Slidings of Pleasure. Said opening is a barrage o non-linear images and sounds - centred on a young female prisoner (Anicée Alvina) in jail, with machine gun fire, broken glass and drones among the sounds - whilst the cast is introduced one-by-one. It was a film sold for its erotic content, but just from this opening, the sound design alone, Alain Robbe-Grillet's film keeps one unsettled, not a conventional film the slightest.

It is, to an outsider, a confrontational and alien film, a tale of a young woman who may have killed an older woman Nora (Olga Georges-Picot), likely her lover. After Jean-Louis Trintignant has questioned her, this prisoner finds herself in incarceration in a place ran by nuns for all criminal young women like her. With its numerous scenes of white walls, even the composition of scenes in this lower budget film is disarming, in humorous details like a bicycle strategically in shot in the all-white bedroom she and Nora lived in, and Nora dies within, to Robbe-Grillet never having the colour green ever appear onscreen. Repeating motifs - red paint (and the painting of bodies like one of Yves Klein's compositions), eggs, broken glass - cause one to feel off-centre to the material. We will see Alvina's lead wrap men and women around her fingers, or more aptly with her aura, either a wide eyed innocent teen or a seductress to whoever it is that dares enter her prescience. Sometimes both and she even has a vampire symbolism around her.

The film is going to be an uncomfortable transgressive experience for some, as a very sexually explicit work with deliberate taboos, just alone from Anicée Alvina being seventeen at the time of the film. This is the only aspect which is of its era, the transgression beyond this more deliberate, as she is seen nude and in scenes of a (softcore) sexual nature; beyond this, alongside Alvina being a compelling lead, with a magnetic charisma, her character is also a character beyond just being an object to lust over. The film is about this proudly devious figure, a true anti-heroine in the sense that, between nymphet and woman, she takes controls always over the rest of the gullable cast. Robbe-Grillet's trademark that his films are openly artificial is also here, even in the English title Successive Slidings of Pleasures having an unsettling nature as much as it wants you to cheer the lead on, even if her taste of music, of screams of a woman being tortured, are a very acquired taste. The subversion of Catholicism in the film is its own taboo as well.

Our lead, who is liable to fabricate tales to bend people to her, is an extreme, one that when a female student during a field trip died, falling off a seaside cliff, she begins to star molesting the body of as a young Isabelle Huppert looks on disgustedly. With a film around her that is not conventional at all, the vampiric/witch metaphors are apt as those who try to tame her either are bedridden at death's door from her constant badgering, as what happens to Michael Lonsdale's judge, or is turned into someone like her, as what happens to her female lawyer, the recasting of Olga Georges-Picot in the same role a doppelganger motif in itself, becoming a vampiric figure in her own right lusting over another young woman in the nun ran jail. As with all Alain Robbe-Grillet films, he plays to the artificiality of his films even in deliberate alienation effects Bertolt Brecht used, even for one of his films closest to a lurid genre film from this time, Euro-horror and erotica. One such example, when not accidentally catching on film the sound of a real guillotine being erected at the location they were filming within off-screen, is the casting of Georges-Picot herself, her dual casting also contrasted by the fact that she has very early plastic surgery for breast enhancement. Far from a crass thing to point out, it means that her body has artificiality, her figure not changing laid down, which Robbe-Grillet deliberately contrasts in duplication, matching Nora anatomically against a mannequin she and the lead have, disturbing one that they ritually break to pieces and stab with scissors.

The film is absolutely perverse on purpose, even in recreating the work of Yves Klein. Klein, who developed his own type of blue paint, International Klein Blue (IKB), created the work Anthropometry of the Blue Period, in which he would have women strip and paint their bodies in this colour blue to imprint on canvases, recreated here with Anicée Alvina using red paint, alongside the motif of body painting with body painting between her character and Nora. It is a film which in terms of plot too is going to challenge as it is around a series of scenarios where a lead who does not even have a name provided to her finds herself in control, where the trial will never happen and even an ouroboros transpires for the final scene, repeating everything again in the film we never see after. It stands out, probably one of the strongest if you can accept its transgressions of these Alain Robbe-Grillet films in how much its motifs and tone burn into the mind, such as the bed frame washed up on the beach encountered repeatedly. Undeniably, it is challenging yet in itself, its style is paradoxically easier to sell, but it befits the term "cult" perfectly as much as it is too uncompromising to be placed in any genre tag.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Transgressive

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High