Diary of a Secretary (2007)

Watched Tuesday 4th March 2025

Director: Francesco Fanelli

Starring: Roberta Gemma, Julie Silver, Victoria Lanz, Veronica Belli, Rossella Conti, Marco Nero, Franco Trentalance, Johnny Montoya, Dieter von Stein, Leonardo Conti and Teo Mantera

 

I decided, like a mad man, to try to rent and watch every new release in 2025 on DVD or Blu Ray from the sole postal rental service to my knowledge that still exists. I made one exception, the later seasons of long running television, but this challenge whilst not likely to be finished also raises that I'll be out of my comfort zone greatly too, as this includes genres and television series I normally would not venture into.

The decision to even break the fourth wall and admit that, whilst this review will be written and completed in March 2025, is to be made available time after is telling. Its not out of embarrassment of watching a softcore cut of an Italian 2000s hardcore porn film, but because this is not a film of any kind to start this idea off with whenever published, the kind that feels disjointed to a negative point regardless of what you were watching it for. Released on Blu Ray in 2025 among imported CGI animated films for families and a David Attenborough documentary series about animals in Asian countries, watching this deliberately distancing yourself from its intended goal of arousal is a very weird thing to do, I admit that, if as a result strangely fascinating to ever do like a bizarre visual experience. However, with this particular one, director Francesco Fanelli's utterly exposes many problems with this on many levels, even if it feels cruel to bury any film for me nowadays.

Distanced from its intentions, the film feels like a series of choreographed rituals, rather than actual erotica, and it is confounded by the very little plot it intended to have, feeling like a distracting factor. The first question to ask, about this tale of a female secretary Roberta (Roberta Gemma) being hired by a male member of the mafia to document his family's sordid behaviour, is why softcore releases are still being produced. Considering the internet exists, that this let alone is available in a high definition version is a side of physical media in the UK of curious note. "Smug without smut", to borrow the term the American Genre Film Archive coined for screening (and releasing) pornography with cut versions in the United States, is a concept of being able to excise the actual sex, which is still divisive for people, and present the story around it as entertainment. Also, the United Kingdom still has stricter rules on pornography, and whilst the internet does exist, still so do the licensed sex shops which find themselves ostracised in the wasteland of cities next to petrol stations. Even without the possible shame, or disinterest, in viewing the extended real sex scenes, there may be additional income to selling these cuts still, and what has to be factored in with this version, and the modern releases in Britain, is that they almost all come now from Salvation Group. A significant company in the history of cult British VHS and DVD cinema under their label Redemption Films, they're behind most of these releases like today's review in the current day, and there's more to releasing this than the factors suggested already.

Salvation/Redemption is a multimedia concept founded in 1993 by Nigel Wingrove, who beforehand was involved in design and is also a man who managed to get one of his short films banned under British blasphemy laws, with Visions of Ecstasy (1989), the only film to only have been in the British Isles. Alongside its promos evoking the more explicit designer work for the metal band Cradle of Filth, who Wingrove has collaborated with, Redemption Film became an arm in making European horror and genre cinema onto British VHS shelves. In the DVD era, it became a way for me to first encounter Jean Rollin and various obscure titles from countries like Italy alongside the likes of Arrow Video's earliest releases. Wingrove has also since the start been fascinated with erotic filmmaking, distributing it in the United Kingdom. Be it softcore/sexploitation cinema through the Jezebel label started in 1994, to Japanese pinku releases and edited version of hardcore filmmaking, the company through its various labels has embraced these films as much as horror and other genres since the origin point. Even including edited versions of modern 2010s-onwards American pornographic cinema, these titles are still appearing in the high street here in Britain, and with Blu Ray releases coming out in 2025, there is a view here of celebrating these types of films too clearly felt.

The delay in the review is out of hindsight that, with respect for the cultural institution, this is mean to Redemption Films as much as to the creators of Diary of a Secretary, because this particular production is neither one thing nor another as desired. Mid-2000s modernist erotica shot in middle class Italian homes, likely rented out to adult productions, could be my thing with its stark, matter-of-fact lighting. Its style would befit a crime soap opera, something that even if sparse and clichéd could've at least gotten to something compelling. Sadly it never gets to this or whatsoever having a real story, not even a low budget aesthetic to depict this premise of the sordid criminal life and the sexual relationships of mafia, which would've least been interesting in itself. Someone in a flashback making life miserable by complaining about a Japanese restaurant's food and then sleeping with the owner's wife is the most dynamic moment, but it leads nowhere. Even if there's a charm to just staging it in someone's home masquerading as a restaurant with some sushi on a plate acquired, you could've had fun, for all the additional issues a lot of pornography still has for people, with the material.

Even with a lack of budget, there's a charm for this particularly viewer in micro budgets, and the idea of pornography with its rented out homes, wondering how much of the backdrop and items around the shelves belong to someone, is a compelling aesthetic if a curious one. Even if it leads to the most uncomfortable idea of having a person's bare torso pressed into the cold steel handle of a weight lift machine, whilst I won't kink shame anyone, at least the production had the wherewithal to hire a gym. None of these locations feel like they were needed, and could be removed, which presents the huge problem here that this all feels perfunctory regardless of the reason you came to it as an audience member.

If this film had entirely embraced being pornography and rested on its visuals, we could've had something interesting, and there is another film Redemption Films released that I still owe an apology for as an example, which was Michael Ninn's Cashmere (1999). Entirely a work about staged real sex scenes, what however stood out about it, and why I completely understand Nigel Wingrove releasing this on DVD back in the day even censored, was that he used it to tackle the sixties, specifically the early sixties where he has adult actresses dressed like Jackie Kennedy and cheerleaders, and fetishises fifties era diners and the colour pink as much as the bodies of his male and female cast. Diary of a Secretary, even if the English dub nearly pushes this into an episode of an old Channel 4 series Eurotrash, could have entirely played off even its look and tone like a televised gangster pastiche even if also erotic scenes only, playing up to this aesthetic and type of characters. The lack of prop firearms on the male cast by itself adds to the perfunctory nature.

The discrepancy in not doing more with the material is felt when this is definitely a softcore cut, as there are moments clearly reshot with clothing still worn obscuring details. Thus, literal dry humping, abstracting the content further as the amount of pouting, gurning and grunting become odd performative rituals here and are abstracting sexual desire. It is 99% of the film, the sex scenes, and without the salacious content, the issues of the film lacking spark is felt in that there is no flair or sense of idiosyncrasy to the footage. The film doesn't help when one woman is offered to mob goons as a gift, and the last line even if being jolted is a misogynistic barb, but I'd prefer women to be the ones to give the opinion on depictions of themselves, and damn specific films like this, whether it be the Andrea Dworkin anti-pornography side or the pro-sex feminists. The actresses here follow a type - all barring lead Roberta Gemma having blonde hair, and even she shares a similar body type to appeal to the targeted male audience - so there is absolutely an issue too that this is very perfunctory in how it depicts these idealised male and female erotic figures too, which I think I can criticise.

The women at least stand out more whilst the men, as is a problem for me even in regular films, are virtually interchangeable in themselves barring their hairstyles. Even if a form of objectification, even a film like this has its actresses in distinct clothes with prop jewellery, whilst the men could have their heads blurred and one would not care who was who, which raises issues for a film trying to be about gangsters and inherently meant to be of interest as cast members. It also raises an issue that porn as much objectifies men at its worse as much as it objectifies the women in the worse cases, if in different ways. Here, one guy is different because he has spiked his hair out with wax, whilst at least the actresses can have access to mesh body costumes, floral dresses, and exaggerated blue eyeliner John Waters would gush over. It is not enough to defend their generic depiction, but is at least something to cling onto, emphasising for me with the male cast in similar dark suits how limited and crap men's fashion can be in comparison.

It feels like shooting fish in a barrel, particularly as other Francesco Fanelli films have had Blu-Ray releases in 2025 and may offer works with more on their mind even in terms of titillation. However, this particular case was abrupt to witness in something which feels as blank as this. In this case, it's with a sense that, even on a purely crass level, there's a complete lack of aesthetics even on a horniness level, nor any sense of the film really revealing in its content. Roberta only starts writing in the first pages of the diary in the last act, as if an accidental metaphor the plot's lack-there-of, and if one has a mad roulette of films they want to see in a year like I want to, you really do feel gut disappointment, even on behalf of the director and cast, when the result feels like it is going through the motions in any medium and genre.

Bangkok Haunted (2001)

Director: Oxide Pang and Pisut Praesangeam

Screenplay: Pisut Praesangeam and Sompop Wetchapipat

Cast: Pimsiree Pimsee as Paga / Jieb, Dawan Singha-Wee as Pan, Kalyanut Sriboonrueng as Kanya, Pete Thongchua as Nop

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

A horror anthology from Thailand, Bangkok Haunted however does something very different in not having the wraparound start the feature, but immediately lunging into the first of three stories, so let us begin as such too. An ancient drum, for the first story, is being transferred in a truck. It is established to have a ghost woman haunting the instrument as the man watching the items in the back is more concerned of leaping out at speed onto the road to get away. The young woman that receives this drum, Jieb (Pimsiree Pimsee), is going to have to deal with the haunted consequences.

We see the drum's origins in 1917, as it is connected to an adopted girl whose parents died of sickness and whose adoptive father is a scholar of music. Raised to become a dancer, Paga (also played Pimsee) befriends another child, a disfigured and ostracised one, who when they become adults is infatuated with her despite Paga only views him as a brother whilst loving another man. This is the most conventional of the three stories in plotting, yet allowed enough space to breathe as Jieb in the modern day with an older male scholar, wandering into flashbacks in the past within her dreams without warning, realise something is amiss with the drum and research its past. It seems like a critique, for a forty four minute segment, that I will not write a lot about this segment beyond this, but it starts with a sound opening for the entire project by co-director Oxide Pang. Oxide Pang with his twin brother Danny came into prominence by the 2000s for films that caught the "Tartan Asian Extreme" wave of interest in the West for Asian genre cinema. Born in Hong Kong, they have juggled genres, action with Bangkok Dangerous (1999) and its 2008 remake with Nicolas Cage, alongside the original 2002 version of The Eye, a horror film about a woman who sees ghosts as a blind woman who was given her sight back through a donor's set of eyes. Their work outside the director's chair deserves credit too as Danny Pang was the editor on the Infernal Affairs trilogy (2002-3), the first one of the many films from the East which caught on fire with interest for Western film fans. They have worked together as brothers but also separately, Oxide Pang making this film instead with Pisut Praesangeam, a Thai filmmaker/producer/screenwriter in the latter's home country, setting this anthology within Bangkok.

The first segment is the pair's most traditional anthology story in tone, one which does provide an appropriately macabre twist - [Spoiler Warning] one of Paga's arms was inside the drum and we learn how it got there [Spoilers End] - and feels the perfect length for its micro-feature tone by itself. After this, Bangkok Haunted's stories are more idiosyncratic in their structures. Probably the biggest virtue, for a film for whatever inexplicable reason I hated when I first saw it, likely due to its slow burn pace, is that all three segments are distinct. Even if the next two as tales entirely set in the modern urban landscape of Bangkok, those two managed to stand out from each other in tone, and since the entire feature is over two hours long and lets them all feel like micro-features, there is no sense of rushing plot points or losing their individual moods either. The wraparound, whilst with a spooky gotcha in the final shot, is not really a story but I still liked it, especially as it feels more like a nice wrapping that does not need to have a dynamic build. It is a curveball when that, only after a forty four minute tale, we have it established three female friends are telling scary stories in a cafe, with them critiquing plot logic or trying to figure out cool titles for each other's stories. It is actually a cool twist on the horror anthology tone to not have a twist, just a trio of interesting story tellers who are friends and engaging with each other.

Story two could be said to be too convoluted and weird for its own good, but it is weird for me as much in a good way. The mature tale of the three, with its explicit nudity and grotesqueness, it is about an essence called Phy Essence. The segment is almost out of order in explaining the plot details, which is why it could be extremely confusing, but as for our female lead, the Phy Essence is a love potion which you can buy hush hush, here in a funny moment in a sex shop where a male customer complains the porn tape he has rented is too damaged at the best parts. The essence is seen once slipped into a man's drink, but is a McGuffin, not really explained but designed to make men fall inescapably in love with the woman who uses it.

The essence, as established in the first scene in a hospital morgue with necrophilia overtones, is collected by one guy who finds recently dead and beautiful female corpses, and is made from the blood collected from their slit open necks. It is a task he secretly gets on with even if he is in danger of being caught, or finds a male colleague getting drunk on the shift and sleeping under a blanket on one of the gurneys among the corpses. That we see the corpses occasionally open their eyes or move their hands suggests that the Phy Essence has ill advised magical aspects too, more so as there is a ghost woman looming about, and that with one of the male suitors, you see the harmful effects of the essence. Not only does he effectively sleep with both a living and dead woman at the same time on a one night stand, but ends up first puking up for the initial symptoms, only to be at death's door with a Buddhist priest trying to help him. Another will be killed by a car and immediately come back as a ghost due to the essence, and it is clear the magic behind it has dangerous properties alongside the gristly nature of the concoction just making the dead angry and come back to haunt those involved in using it.

It is a very idiosyncratic story, probably more vague then it itself realises, very erotic and sexually explicit in a way that it is quite striking with time passing, be it the humour of the lead living next door to a couple in an apartment who are too loud in their passions, or the necrophilia aspects at the morgue. We had some transgressive films from this early 2000s wave that dealt with sexuality - like Takeshi Miike from Japan and the late Kim Ki-duk from South Korea, the later sadly someone we have to put a caveat around due to sexual misconduct allegations - but sexuality was not really as prominent in this era of violence, of action and genre films which did not really tackle those subjects, or the trend for ghost stories influenced from Asian filmmakers modernising them, only to get remade as American films that same decade. You can make the argument this is erotic for the sake of titillation, not for profoundness, but at the same time, you also have a story where despite this women are central to the plot, which is striking within itself. It is effectively a moral tale of women stuck in the position of needing the Phy Essence, because they feel they need to go out into night clubs for men to date, with the essence whose gift is too dangerous. It is a tale when even men who die from its effect become ghosts too, leading to a haunting here where those made to love a woman will do so even if, in one of the best shots of the whole film, they live together in physical embrace after her death in the same grave. With its very electronic, New Age tinged music, it has for all its all-over-the-place plotting a distinct tone that I appreciated, effectively a cousin to a segment for the Three Extremes (2004) anthology, which was expanded into a 2004 feature film by itself, a work directed by Hong Kong director Fruit Chan called Dumplings. Three... Extremes leant into the growing interest in Asian cinema at the time with three directors from three different countries - Fruit Chan from Hong Kong and known for films like Made in Hong Kong (1997), Takashi Miike from Japan, and one of the biggest figures to gain prominent and his career grown from this trend, Park-Chan Wook from South Korea. Dumplings itself in either its versions was explicitly about the theme I feel the Phy Essence is about, the idea of women forced to follow gendered conventions, in that case to stay youthful in a world when men's eyes wander to younger women, through the very twisted concept of Chinese dumplings made with human foetuses. Whilst Bangkok Haunted's own tale of ill advised love charms is stranger, they make a fascinating pair on the cursed love remedies from the perspectives of women if you have a strong stomach for one of the pair mentioned.

Story three begins with a scene of a crime, where a woman has hung herself in a warehouse. The police office on the case suspects it was not a suicide but a murder, believing there was no way for her to get up to where she was found alongside evidence of a struggle beforehand. Whilst the police chief refuses to press on with this idea, he investigates on his own terms, and the coroner cements his concerns when there are suspicious clues complicating her death. This is interesting as a crime mystery steeped in the supernatural; when a scene transpires when a random couple following him swear they saw a woman trying to get out of the moving vehicle, it is clear he is now haunted by her too. All three stories involve ghostly women wronged, and that really becomes apparent for this tale of a horrible series of circumstances for its one innocent, the woman herself.

Whilst in dire need of a high definition re-release, it is by this segment I came to appreciate Bangkok Haunted's general washed out and dingy aesthetic with moments of subtle colour. Even though one of the tales is partially set in 1917, with significantly more colour in the forest locations, this film really emphasises the idea of the back alleys and dark night streets of Bangkok throughout itself. With there being a second scene in this segment within a sex shop, as the lead makes enquiries on the woman leading to her husband, it is very atmospheric in imagining these ghosts drifting among the living in these cramped environments, the places not seen as idyllic and grungy but the real world for normal people stuck in crammed apartments trying to find ways to get on in life. They are not disconnected from the living either, which makes this aesthetic more appropriate, as it leads to suspicion of domestic abuse from her husband, seemingly changed and wheelchair bound from a car crash. The key to the segment from here is a series of red herrings, including a male lover of hers who is a boss at a construction site, where the many men in her life are not good people. This includes the lead himself who is revealed to have been part of it too. There is a sick humour as more people are revealed to be innocent when information is learnt when it is too late, including unfortunate deaths of suspects, and one of the best turns when someone's innocence is proven but through his involvement for another crime of political corruption. One twist comes fully from a murder mystery pot boiler - [Huge Spoiler] with the help of ice to be able to reach a hanging spot [Spoilers End] - and ultimately not even our white knight lead is a good man, just finding excuses to purge his own guilt from the things he did to the woman.

The story has many trigger warnings as already brought up and also revealed, including a deliberate miscarriage with a coat hanger that is not comfortable to witness without being tasteless. They lead to this being the saddest tale of the three about a woman who did not deserve her lot, whose affairs were clearly to escape her misery, and whose fate leaves her a ghost watching those involved discover their own complicity and fall off the rails. It is a perfect conclusion to a trio of stories I unfairly dismissed in my youth, and I have absolute respect for the entire project, with three strong entries, being a very good horror anthology which took risks, be it telling a traditional ghost story, being very weird and sexual, and for this one to actually force one to sympathise for its female lead in its uncomfortable nods to how bad human beings can be to each other.

Fruits of Passion (1981)

 

Director: Shūji Terayama

Screenplay: Shūji Terayama and Rio Kishida

Based on Retour à Roissy by Anne Desclos

Cast: Isabelle Illiers as O, Klaus Kinski as Sir Stephen, Arielle Dombasle as Nathalie, Peter as Madame, Keiko Niitaka as Aisen, Sayoko Yamaguchi as Sakuya, Hitomi Takahashi as Byakuran, Miyuki Ono as Kasen, Kenichi Nakamura as Le jeune homme, Ogaku, Akiro Suetsugu as Obana, Renji Ishibashi as Kato, Takeshi Wakamatsu as Le gardien de la maison, Georges Wilson as Le narrateur

An Abstract Candidate

 

Fruits of Passion feels caught between an unfortunate schism, a compromise between two sides which fits the legacy of a sequel novel by Anne Desclos, the original novel itself caught between the schism of being criticized by feminists for a tale of a woman becoming the ultimate submissive to men, yet also was a work by a woman who, even if hiding under a pseudonym until she finally revealed her authorship, was intelligent and as much writing the book as a challenge to the person she held the dearest, Jean Paulhan, the director of the prestigious Nouvelle Revue Française literary magazine, in his belief no woman could write an erotic novel¹. In general the erotic films of the past, specifically the ones this is linked to from the seventies, are always going to be challenging in terms of whether their ideas and tone can be defended or not, but this one is also matched by a director in Shūji Terayama, with his collaborators, who was unsung and interesting as he found himself her stuck trying to escape the cage of the genre as the lead herself symbolically wishes to. The film’s central premise of transgressive is questioned by the film itself, as it becomes a pretext which clearly sold the film, with its nudity and sex, but as the most un-erotic of erotic films and more concerned with its tale of Western imperialism on the East, gender and the denizens of a brothel we find ourselves with.

Terayama’s films have been generally difficult to actually see officially, which has made them a Holy Grail for me as a fan of surrealistic cinema, with Fruits of Passion one of the few more readily available as a French-Japanese co-production with a wider reach, one of a couple from a time where Nagisa Ōshima's In the Realm of the Senses (1976) was another Argos Film production they funded and the most notorious. Its presentation as a generic sounding erotic film with the potential for problematic content would have not necessarily been a promising introduction to this figure, in which the notorious actor Klaus Kinski, as Englishman Sir Simon, takes a young woman O (Isabelle Illiers) to 1920s Shanghai to become a willing/unwilling brothel sex worker for his fantasies. It is a subject that may prove a concern, but is shot through the eye of a director with a complete lack of interest in eroticizing this, and even in mind to the film feeling like a compromise, shows his voice in a distinct direction, as he brought with him his cinematographer Tatsuo Suzuki and composer J.A. Seazer to drastically undercut the direction of the premise. Also important is the co-writer, Rio Kishida, a female playwright and collaborator with Shūji Terayama who wrote plays explicitly dealing with the lives of women, such as the play Thread Hell about women working in a silk thread factory in 1939. That she wrote among multiple films Marquis de Sade’s Prosperities of Vice (1988), Akio Jissôji's sexually explicit erotic drama set in the 1920s and based on the writings of the Marquis de Sade, she had no qualms about dealing with transgressive sexuality as much as feminist ideas.

This is felt with a sense of a film which is running away from its central premise as soon as possible. As much of this comes from O’s story itself as, barring some moments, it is not of real interest for either screenwriter. Shūji Terayama does evoke moments, like a childhood memory of her father abandoning her symbolized by a chalk outline as a child she cannot escape from, which show more to her psyche, but she feels like an outsider to the material as well as with Isabelle Illiers really feeling uncomfortable onscreen having to be continually nude, so much so a client of O’s comments about it and asks if she ever gets cold. Ultimate her plot barring its symbolic template is more rewarding than her dramatic arch, as it is visibly clear the brothel as a whole, and Shanghai under the influence of corrupt Westerners like Sir Simon, is the greater concern. Whilst a curious concoction of a Chinese setting, French co-production credits with French or English dubbing on the cast, and a Japanese production team behind the camera and Japanese actors onscreen with European figures like Illiers and Kinski, you also get a cast of idiosyncratic faces. Legendary model and Steely Dan album cover figure Sayoko Yamaguchi is one of the women working in the brothel, and whilst the brothel mistress is played, whilst dubbed, by Peter, the actor from the seminal LGBTQ film Parade of Roses (1969), and would later appear in Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985), looking as glorious as you can get whilst also emphasized as a more complex figure in the little he gets. Whilst initially presenting a strict punishment regime including punishing prayer, the mistress is revealed to actually be a caring woman in charge of a family of women and some male assistants who are just trying to survive.

The complete disinterest in being sexy feels on point, in contrast to the aesthetic beauties that are Terayama’s trademarks, such as the use of colour lighting, the surrealistic and melancholic sequences in-between, and the general lush aesthetic style, both attempting to be realistic to the time period but due to the curious co-production history showing its artifice at times. Attempts at a more distinct plot – as a young man who works at a cheap restaurant just by the brothel becomes smitten with O – are interesting, but it’s a fragment of an entire eighty minute film which in that short running time does show potential evidence that the film was compromised on its way to being completed. It feels like it was not given the potential to expand with the grace Terayama’s other films, even a piece explicitly about sexual desire, the mini-feature Grass Labyrinth (1979), could show.

The most compelling fragments from what survived come from the side characters and the context, which in its use of exotic aesthetic, whether defendable or not, evokes the works of Josef von Sternberg; the set up without the explicit sexual content in the thirties would have been a film Marlene Dietrich could have been the star of. The little of the historical plot is the most dynamic in how, with his desire to corrupt O, whilst also having a mistress on the side named Nathalie (Arielle Dombasle), Sir Simon is a terrible person. Kinski’s real life is one I do not want to touch with a barge pole, but he was a compelling figure especially in his antagonism with Werner Herzog. Even dubbed, the twisted aura he always had whilst too uncomfortable at times in certain places fits here, apt for the corrupt figure who thinks he can play games with the Chinese locals, even on a whim funding the Coolie Rebellion, trying to liberate the country from Western influence, and finding himself on a knife’s edge due to this. Even here the erotic set up makes sense as, being a voyeur wanting to see O degrade herself, the romance with the young man in the restaurant and his precarious gambling with life, literalized in metaphor in a casino, is his downfall spiritually and physically when money cannot get what he wants.

Alongside the humour which crops up, like a soldier being spanked for stealing the fictional underwear of his metaphorical mother in a BDSM mistress-client fantasy, or the weirdness of the swan rocker, briefly seen as a combination of a rocking horse and a sex bench, which cuffs a person in it belly first with its rib cage-like mechanics, allowing them to flap their arms like a swan, you see the side of this film which is Terayama’s, and it stands out. Alongside undercutting the illusion of its premise, like J.A. Seizer long before his work in the anime Revolutionary Girl Utena (1997) indulging in some time inappropriate but awesome prog rock, there are plenty of times this is undercutting the expectations. It has a lot of bird metaphors in their freedom symbolically, from cutting to a dead one filmed floating down the river, or the dream sequence of Illiers naked and chained on a bed, on the roof outside with birds tied to it flapping about, or really poignant scenes not involving O, such as the life of the former actress who is one of the sex worker. She has the most interesting route, from the humour of her role plays in imaginary films with clients, with male staff playing the director with a fake camera, or the tragic “adieu le cinema” that finished her story, which has the set up of a grand piano being talked of in the river pay off in a beautifully haunting moment when it rises out of the nearby water with a corpse being lifted on top of it.

This definitely counts as a flawed gem, especially as it has very little time to fully dissect the complex gender politics it had clearly in mind, something out of the ordinary in this especially when a few years later, you get the likes of Bolero (1984) with Bo Derek held as infamously bad, and erotic cinema would drastically change against especially into the nineties. It feels like the weakest of Shūji Terayama‘s films I have seen entirely because it feels compromised by its production history, working with material to the best he could, and that we were able to get makes this still rewarding. Only the fact most of his career is difficult to officially see, unlike this film, feels the sour aspect to all of this.

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike

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

================

1) The Story of the Story of O, written by Carmela Ciuraru for Guernica, and published June 15th 2011.

À l'aventure (2008)

 

Director: Jean-Claude Brisseau

Screenplay: Jean-Claude Brisseau

Cast: Carole Brana as Sandrine, Arnaud Binard as Greg, Étienne Chicot as the Taxi Driver, Jocelyn Quivrin as Fred, Lise Bellynck as Sophie, Nadia Chibani as Mina, Estelle Galarme as Françoise, Frédéric Aspisi as Jérôme

An Abstract Candidate

 

Sadrine (Carole Brana) begins with a friend on a bench where an older man sat near them on the same public furniture starts talking about their complacency as a species to act like sheep, starting her journey in self doubt which in context to how the film goes, could easily become a pretentious smut film. If my choice of words seem scathing, this will be a kinder review of À l'aventure, though viewing it as a flawed production which still is worthy of examining over and over. It is not a condemnation of erotica as a potential for art, or smut as inherently a bad thing, but in mind that this is a film by Jean-Claude Brisseau. The late French filmmaker presents a film which is doomed in nature, a film by an older cis male director making an erotic film with a female lead, which is common in the history of cinema, and made more complicated due to Brisseau's controversial real life history. A filmmaker since the seventies, I watched a film like Noce Blanche (1989) which still has erotic elements, but is a drama which focused on its characters complexities. Many will probably know him from Secret Things (2002), which was promoted in the early 2000s as a sexually explicit thriller and also begins the contentious aspect of his career. In 2005, he was found guilty in French courts for sexually harassing actresses in the auditions for that film, two actresses asked to perform explicit sexual acts during the audition process which included them being filmed, leading to him being fined and a one-year suspended jail sentence¹. This does not help scrutinise his career afterwards, especially when with The Exterminating Angels (2006), Brisseau had the gall if you condemn the man to depict his own criminal event in a speculative dissection of the incident which is sexually explicit as well. À l'aventure presents, however, something which feels drenched in ennui, presented as an erotic film where sensuality is still there, but the initial premise of Sadrine looking for the perfect orgasm, a premise from any softcore erotica, given way as a Trojan horse to existential dread. This review will not defend the man at all, but it fascinates as if the results of that criminal charge bled into this production completely.

It feels too obvious, before even watching the film and digesting it after, to just damn the production, more as even if its director presents a concern, now he marked himself for sins away from the film camera, films still present complicated psychological readings. The challenge for a man to write a woman's voice, and the perils of them doing it in a way which is potentially embarrassing, does however not ignore how intentionally (or unintentionally) write their own psychological state into any character they touch. With Jean-Claude Brisseau, this is even more of an issue, but Sadrine's lack of satisfaction with her boyfriend and routine starts as a set up for so many erotic works, sleeping with the stereotypically handsome male psychoanalysis, but feels like the work of a man drained in what he made. Even if going through the motions of erotic, it feels instead like Sadrine's sense of dissatisfaction is more than arousal, and this is also Brisseau's own, more poignant when his fascination of female sexual desire rightly got him criminated.

Whether the film itself actually succeeds is subjective, but in this case for this viewer, it is a failure from trying to be a profound about the meaning of life, as it falls into clichés, but becomes far more interesting and more rewarding as the struggle for meaning, and that pervading sense of distance a director-writer who pigeonholed himself into the stereotype of erotic cinema ended up in here. Brisseau has a type, let us be honest, of the slim intellectually beautiful woman who is bisexual in the ideal of certain cis male views, but even the male lead is an erotic ideal for him as a cis male, the ideal erotic man in Greg (Arnaud Binard), handsome and intelligent, embodying the desirable figure for this ideal woman. It is to the point he is named after actor Gregory Peck for a cineaste reference, a figure who believes in confronting conventional morality. The irony is knowing he will be skewered as a false love interest for Sadrine, and that feels on purpose, whilst Brisseau's own stand in is the older male taxi driver, who has no interest in Sadrine physically but like each other as figures wanting to talk about their place in the world. It is an erotic film which however falls back onto Brisseau's static camera takes, from cinematographer Wilfrid Sempé, of talking and Sadrine finding more insight with the aforementioned taxi driver, played by Étienne Chicot, who began her self doubts and shows more interest for her as a fully thinking figure.

It would almost be self parody in some of the scenarios here, as she encounters a submissive mistress to an open minded heterosexual couple, that indulge in cinematic light BDSM, but the idea of a restless middle class who need to escape routine is felt too, following sexual fantasies whether they can help or not. This comes with the issue of gender bias, beautiful women in the conventional idea who are intelligent on a surface level and open to all sexual scenarios as here. It becomes an issue with the figure who made this film who fell into the trap of thinking this ideal would be forced onto women, rather than how much more complex people are, and rightly got a criminal prosecution for this and thus marking all his art work with a stain we need to always point at even if we stay open minded to watching the films still. I would even accept being called a hypocrite for even watching this film or even taking some surface pleasure from it, but it comes with many details that dissect itself, becoming more than the stereotypical film of a bad filmmaker, bad in the true sense for badness as a man and not for something arbitrary as whether the dialogue makes sense, or if the film is well made. Figures, all women, are figuring themselves out existentially, be it from trauma of losing a child, or boredom and stifled sense of their purpose in life, and the mess of this take on the subject is still compelling even from a deeply failed production.

Even if objectifying a figure of desire, if figures speak at all of concerns or pains, even for humour, that can be a writer revealing more of themselves then they may realise. À l'aventure, set in the urban France of so many French films about anxiety and relationship tensions, where tellingly enlightenment comes from fleeing to the countryside, is filtered through divorces, the issue of the ideal marriage of heterosexual couples being hollow, and of how many of these characters here talk of themselves as wives or female figures being bored. The friend meant to say Sadrine's decision to ditch her job and work, drifting along in her sexual journey, is deluding herself ends up running off with an arms dealer in a romance and disappears from the film entirely, an absurd touch in the context but apt for the film. Even if the film ultimately feels like it is grasping at straws sexually and philosophically, that touches on a feeling of conventional reality being unstable from aimlessness that is one of the film's better aspects.

The fantasy the film is set up in is an issue unless you accept the inherent flaw of this particular piece of erotic trying to be serious, instead revealing itself as softcore punching above its weight but with the failed boxing blows still revealing so much more. You cannot work unless you are on the dole, or a true outsider, and there is more to even a naive writer like myself about the notion of a polyamorous relationship that, even for unrepentant and proud smut, you could work with beyond this, whilst this feels tame and falls into the problems of really hollow sexual fantasies shot for cinema that have women as the eroticised figures. But the fantasy still starts as a perfect template because of the fact it collapses, and the fantasy instead exaggerates the fixations that are uncomfortably real. Even when it looks like it is getting into a fantasy scenario that would be considered problematic and requires a lot more concern, even if transgressive to consider, about the place the willing submissive enjoys and controls the scenario as much as the dominant, the film throws the least expected curveball.

That scenario is when Greg is convinced to hypnotise the three female leads by the women themselves, which can make a viewer uncomfortable especially as erotica has the fantasy of mind control and hypnosis, frankly with the issues right to consider about whether it is a healthy scenario to imagine depending on the context. À l'aventure however completely undercuts this. Even if these turns in this type of world cinema I got into from DVD can be the moments which lose viewers as ridiculous, I am always happy when I get what I was not expecting from such films. It is set up that one figure Mina (Nadia Chibani) is susceptible to hypnosis, to the point a coin on her arm when told is hot does leave a real burn, leading into the supernatural crushing this fantasy as she starts to bring up past memories and past lives into what was meant to just be softcore. What was a set up to the sexual fantasy involving all three women turns into a work of figures trying to figure themselves out, accidentally prodding a hole in reality, and Greg making an ill advised attempt to explore this hole that just causes damage. All because he was not prepared to not go into the experiment and went in cluelessly, especially when people start to levitate off the floor in a real miracle.

The philosophical ideas of our repetition and sense of infinite are not original and of depth here, which would become an albatross if a viewer took this film to be a take on existentialism in a really detailed form, but even this abrupt turn in a plot is a surprise, including the one nod to a very contentious subject in French culture when Mima remembers an incident from Algeria in the past, talking of a horrible tragedy she caught the results of when too young to process it. Even the idea, if caught in the issues of Brisseau himself as a compromised artist, of the sexual ecstasy being linked fully to the spiritual is a compelling theory to think of, even if it ends here instead in disaster, those not prepared for the real force beyond their process, and Sadrine realising her ideal erotic man in Greg is not the person she can ever feel fullness as a person from. Ultimately the sex becomes unrewarding, more of a choreographed scenario by the end of this, which is pretty damning for a film that would have been sold on sex, leaving on a beautiful countryside field and discussing how people live in such little time of reality for what has been a millennia plus of the Earth's existence. Eroticism still plays a part in Brisseau's work, but it feels as if it is slowly ebbing away here, burnt by his own controversies of his career but also feeling like it confined him, none of which is a defence of the man in the damndest, but with the sense here the struggle came to the screen in a compelling way.

Abstract Spectrum: Introspective

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

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1) French Director Found Guilty Of Sexual Harassment, written for Movie Mail and published December 20th 2005. Archived for the Web Archive on April 26th 2014.

Nude for Satan (1974)

 

Director: Luigi Batzella

Screenplay: Luigi Batzella

Cast: Rita Calderoni as Susan / Evelyn; Stelio Candelli as Dr. William / Peter; James Harris as The Devil; Renato Lupi as the Butler; Iolanda Mascitti as the Servant Girl

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) / An Abstract Film Candidate

 

Oh darling, what is a memory?

From that title, and the first shot of the version I saw, of an actress skipping through misty dark woodlands barely wearing a lace see-through dressing gown, we know what to expect...at least we presume to. As an erotic Italian horror film Nude for Satan in its softcore version would be too weird and esoteric for the dirty mack brigade. Even in knowledge a hardcore version exists, there is a prevailing sense here that version, as here, would still be an odd duck with what exactly is on its mind.

With the music over the opening credits by Alberto Baldan Bembo a woozy, compelling series of drones, synths and what are apparently bongos, Nude for Satan is a curious one to actually watch. Let us be frank, it is a lackadaisical film with one foot between its weird esoteric dialogue (least for the English dub), its lack of a cohesive in-depth plot, and still trying to be erotica in what is a story structure whose languid leanings undercut the sensuality. A male doctor named William (Stelio Candelli) is driving his white Beetle bug car in a night storm to a patient, only to drive past a car accident with a woman named Susan (Rita Calderoni) inside unconscious. Going to a nearby location, a gothic castle, looking for help, he is immediately sucked into a phantom world outside time which Susan will join him within separately. The castle the moment you step into it is immediately out of reality, where doppelgangers of the other person, in whimsical sex obsessed forms, dressed in gothic melodrama costumes, try to seduce the other, and with an occult eroticism around the frames.

Truthfully, in respect to the fun of Nude for Satan, in a more cohesive form, with focus or even a more overtly experimental form, this premise would have the tone of avant-garde jazz in playing to scenes out of context, mood scenes for the sake of mood. Using its mix of a really cool gothic manor and being brazenly titillating to win the viewer over, there would have been a film more ambitious than what we got with more careful construction to its form. Nude for Satan is sillier than this, from the director of the infamous Video Nasty The Beast in Heat (1977), and it is none of the above, closer instead to a half sketched out Jess Franco film, which may be seen as a damning comment as, even as a fan of Franco, I am fully aware the cult Spanish film maker made films himself that felt like they were mere fragments of a premise themselves. Instead, for those who can appreciate this film as I did, it feels like a half awake fantasy. Not even an erotic one as the sexuality can be justified as being the kind of eyebrow rolling heterosexual male gaze, prurient and conservative in form, which is the most boring kind, not the kind you would get from a Jess Franco which progresses into something more interesting and subversive. What little you get feels more part of its weird fever dreams than playing to sexual freedom, and even the message would be confusing if you attempted to think about it. It does have Satan involved, and plays to the idea of sexuality being dangerous and evil, despite wanting as much female nudity onscreen as possible, thus becoming something prurient without a subversive edge to it, only with the context of anything remotely erotic here being more appropriate “off” tonally as everything else is.

I have to still credit what is a trashy film, in terms of how really unfocused it feels, for having to courage to be this weird, a phantasmagoric soft/hardcore gothic film with some production value and where the doppelgangers talk like figures in a bizarre philosophical discussion on reality. Let us be honest even further than I have gone, you would not get a film like this even in the eighties, something very of the time in how minimal this is even in terms of an exploitation film which barely has a plot at all on its shoulders. Even if someone had made a film like this later, there is something about this time where the money existed for these European genre films, where the location shooting was affordable and not shot in apartments, and the style still there even in this obscurer work to make what thin premise there is here have a compelling mood.

The plot really is not a great deal, as it is a series of scenes, where our leads find themselves entangled in a prolonged scenario in this world of strange grinning older men, seductive female servants, and male and female doppelgangers who are proudly (gloriously) camp in their proclamations of love to the opposite sex. It is a languid oddity with hindsight before you have to explain, or witness watching the moment, when the giant spider inexplicably appears. It is a very fake but thankfully homemade one which that is a cross between a raisin and a tick in form, appearing in a scene to torment the female lead in its web, never explained nor appearing again in context. The fact there are multiple cuts means that, for the softcore version I saw, it may lack a lot of its more openly lurid for exploitation content, instead becoming a far more heady haze dream. It lacks eroticism in terms of openly being sensual, more an experience between worlds where the final orgiastic scene is less sexual than performance art dancing involving a woman with the most openly revealed ribcage possible in cinema. It is a film that, to anyone not used to the way some cult films can be less about cohesion, would be easy to despise. It absolutely is not a film you could present to someone not used to these films, but to those who are firmly comfortable in exploring these curiosities, Nude for Satan is the ambient music album of gothic erotic Italian cinema, for good and for bad.

Abstract Spectrum: Hazy / Minimalist

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

The Pillow Book (1996)

Director: Peter Greenaway

Screenplay: Peter Greenaway

Cast: Vivian Wu as Nagiko; Yoshi Oida as The Publisher; Ken Ogata as The Father; Hideko Yoshida as The Aunt / The Maid; Ewan McGregor as Jerome; Judy Ongg as The Mother; Ken Mitsuishi as The Husband; Yutaka Honda as Hoki

An Abstract List Candidate

 

Treat me like the pages of a book.

Prospero's Book (1991) can be seen as a turning point for the Welsh filmmaker Peter Greenaway. During the nineteen eighties, the former ephemeral and documentary filmmaker developed a reputation of very idiosyncratic films which got him attention and culminated in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), his most well known film and a success. Prospero's Book, his very experimental take on William Shakespeare's The Tempest, was a push in the limits of the cinematic form - his last film with composer Michael Nyman, who would add to Greenaway's  trademarks, and arguably into the nineties when his films would eventually become more obscurer again, especially as they could be difficult.

Interestingly The Pillow Book was a Film4 production, which helps in terms of visibility; what was also common however by now was Greenaway was acquiring Dutch financing for his films, into the Millennium the country of Netherlands being a huge supporter of him both in being able to still make films but also inspiration for his stories. To those who do not know him, it is befitting to know he was once working for the Central Office of Information (COI) on public information films, only to move onto his own film making, even with fictional tales. Obsessed with combining his admiration with high art (a filmmaker who looks to painting and literature constantly with great knowledge) against the crudeness corporal nature of human life and the body, he was an equal opportunity person for showing male and female nudity in-between his fixed obsessions with sex and death, alongside showing a take on lists and order which even an autistic viewer like myself has not leaned into as he has. Prospero's Book for example is structured, retelling The Tempest, around the exiled wizard's library of books and Greenaway letting his imagination run wild.

The Pillow Book, based on the ancient Japanese text by author and court lady Sei Shōnagon, is like many films of his structured on a story but obsessing over these interests of his. Nagiko (Vivian Wu) is a daughter of an author who, frankly, has developed an eroticised obsession with having calligraphy written on her own body due to her father, each of her birthdays, having a ritual recreating how a God created humankind from clay by writing their facial features and gender on his daughter's face. Her travels lead to a chance encounter with a publisher (Yoshi Oida) who forced her father into sexual favours, encountering his lover Jerome (Ewan McGregor) as she, pushed to now writing onto men's bodies as an authoress, is encouraged to publish her own work only to be angered when the publisher rejects her first attempt.

This plot gets more ghoulish, as this eventually leads to a pillow book being made of human flesh, but the most prominent aspect about production is its technical craft and form. Experimenting with the visual frame, Greenaway was a huge critic of the narrative form of cinema ushered in by the likes of D.W. Griffith, considering that it had not evolved. Greenaway became an early adopter of digital editing even when still using celluloid; here in The Pillow Book, whilst not as extreme as Prospero's Book, he takes advantage of it, having multiple screens at points in the images.

Contrasting monochrome flashbacks with current day coloured ones, including the original version of the film using calligraphy for subtitles¹, there can be multiples sequences playing at one, a scene likely to have the events for that character layered for each other as much as different events in different time zones transpiring together. One such example is the frantic love sick suicide of a character being layered together as a collage of screens. It is, still to this day, incredibly innovative especially as experiments like this would lead to Greenaway's cinema managing to evolve further by the time he started using more built, artificial sets into the late 2000s and 2010s for the Dutch co-productions. Before then as well, this would be the second-to-last film with cinematographer Sacha Vierny; Greenaway for all his issues with cinema, is a huge fan of films he admires, such as Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad (1961), rightly proclaimed by him as unique and managing to hire his hero, its cinematographer Vierny, to work with him decades after in the eighties to the end of the nineties, Vierny suited his striking visual look alongside always hiring great production designers, and clearly thinking in composition to match his interest in painting and illustration.

He also here also rode a bit of mainstream culture for once, just from the music choices which can vary between U2 to French pop, the later played with onscreen French subtitles like a karaoke bar video. Brian Eno as the composer does not hurt either, nor casting Ewan McGregor, just around the time of Danny Boyle's Trainspotting (1996), Greenaway even into his later obscurer years hiring some unlikely big names who clearly wanted to work with him. The one detail, the one that I do question, is that for a Japanese protagonist The Pillow Book does cast Chinese actress Vivian Wu, a choice which would be much more difficult to defend into the ongoing decades. I do wonder personally, even though there are actresses he could cast from Japanese cult cinema, even hiring Kirina Mano from Shinja Tsukamoto's Bullet Ballet (1998) for his follow up 8 ½ Women (1999), that there were a lot of issues which lead to this central lead choice. The character does speak fluent Mandarin from childhood, and Cantonese is spoken too as this is set partially in Hong Kong, but there is a sense of someone wanting to hire a higher profile lead willing to do full frontal nudity and that is why Wu was chosen. It is an odd casting choice, like when infamously Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), an American adaptation of a film about geisha culture, hired Chinese actresses to play Japanese women even if a Japanese-owned company produced it. It is the one thing which, over time, does cause one to scratch your head, and I say this knowing Vivian Wu does commit to the role brilliantly. Hers is one of those careers, eventually staying mostly within the Chinese film industry from the 2010s onwards, which is a head scratcher of pop culture just around one person. Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1987) is one of her first prominent films, but it leads to one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle live action films; The Guyver (1991), a Japanese manga adaptation where she is cast as Japanese as well; the Tales from the Crypt TV series; an full motion video game oddity Supreme Warrior (1994), a first person fighting game from Digital Pictures, a company who tried and burnt themselves out (just in cash) by suggesting video games of the future had real actors and real interactive footage; the Highlander TV spin-off series, and various television show appearances from Murder, She Wrote, Millennium and ER, let alone a Peter Greenaway film where she takes admirable risk here in a sexually explicit and incredibly idiosyncratic narrative. She deserves a nod of respect for how idiosyncratic this CV I have barely covered is.

Beyond this, The Pillow Book is a thing of beauty nonetheless. Greenaway's career is full of films I could unpick a lot of detail from, enough in themselves to be big (or at least idiosyncratic) productions if someone else suddenly made them, and I have not even gotten to how distinct his voice is entirely, as Peter Greenaway is a director-writer and stamps his ideas into the material. Eventually his obsession with lists comes into play when, to torment the publisher, Nagiko starts creating books to send to him written on male bodies. That in itself is strange, as eventually you can have men with the calligraphy even hidden on their bodies or an existential text on another wondering if books have parents. The film is a grower. Once you adapt to its style, Greenaway becomes rewarding for a man who pushes the medium but, for all his criticisms of narrative cinema, always has very ornate plots with a lot of black humour and even emotion to them. Here, with one of the only ones with a female lead, it can be seen as a cliché her story is that of love, but even then this is an erotic drama about a strongly independent figure who, by the end, is proudly her own figure still, a peculiar tale to lead to this conclusion that is fascinating to watch.

Abstract Spectrum: Ghoulish/Meticulous/Playful

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

 

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1) Restored, prominently for a 2020 Indicator Blu Ray release in Britain, this subtitling whilst it does not translate everything has a distinct tone that adds to the aesthetic.

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