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"The way to a woman's heart is along the path of torment." More generous than the Marquis, Barbet Schroeder extends the words to all of Paris and discovers a metropolis of kink. The drifter (Gérard Depardieu) hawks art books door to door, "what I want is to see what's behind those walls," the cool blonde (Bulle Ogier) invites him in to fix an overflowing bathtub. Trying to burglarize the apartment on the floor below, he stumbles into a neon-lit den of masks and cages and whips, a metallic staircase unfurls and the lady descends as the S&M grande putain. It's a literal upstairs-downstairs gig, she inaugurates the relationship by asking the befuddled thief to piss on the client licking her boots. (Depardieu's deadpan as he obliges is priceless, in the following scene they're having dinner together.) "People's madness" is the dominatrix's métier, yet romance throws her off her game—tending to some blokes in the dungeon, the mistress goes through her litany of abuse ("Dog! You're in pain, aren't you? I'll skin you alive!") until new emotions crack her mid-session, "some things don't mix." When the couple drops by a chateau to flagellate the lady of the house, Schroeder's drollery is nearly as dapper as Buñuel's, though the continuous sense of performance, of people in and out of control and of shadowy architects, suggest instead Rivette's Story of O. (Ogier's elegance in head-to-toe leather is remembered in Irma Vep as an added frisson.) The lash of mystery, the adventuress and the meathead, a certain whiff of Franju at the abattoir. All in all a disarming affair, down to the capper of the reckless lovers surviving punishment and laughingly finding their own garden. With André Rouyer, Nathalie Keryan, Roland Bertin, and Holger Löwenadler.
--- Fernando F. Croce |