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The setup is adduced from Claire's Knee, and in both cases there's the collision of the literary and the carnal. The writer in Paris (Carl Parker) endures the boredom of a high-class cocktail party for an arrangement with the imperious hostess (Marilyn Roberts), she resembles a jet-lagged Delphine Seyrig while her young protégé (Rebecca Brooke) has Kim Novak's affecting blankness. "At the slightest provocation, she gets all wet," at the jardin botanique she demonstrates with rose and garter belt in an image from Mallarmé, "pareille à la chair de la femme." (The bloke has his own arch analysis: "Perhaps rather overburdened with symbols in, I would say, the surrealist tradition.") The lash of love is captured in glossy photography, the underling flashes an eager smile as she picks the instrument of her own flagellation. The crucifix next to the cabinet of whips does not go unacknowledged: "Forgive me, for I know what I do." The erect obelisk and the gushing fountain, the Robbe-Grillet touch deftly modulated by Radley Metzger. Trysts in restaurants, phone booths, dressing rooms and parked cars, anywhere imaginable to draw out Brooke's striking blur of unease and desire. "Which do you like better—when I embarrass you or when I hurt you?" Bondage and its rites, lush surfaces for rough romping. A question of going too far or not far enough, answered amid the chains and needles and blazing lamps of "the Gothic Chamber," she who departs wields the power (cf. Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant). "Everything resolves itself" on the humping staircase, the camera cranes away for a sunny Gallic vista. Schroeder is parallel with Maîtresse and Polanski in Bitter Moon sends it all up.
--- Fernando F. Croce |