Venus in Furs

Silhouetted hands knock on glass that might be the camera lens itself, just the bracketing images for "some wild, paranoid trip." The symbolic flow kicks off with the befuddled expatriate (James Darren) unearthing his trumpet on sandy shores ("Musicians will understand") and summoning a lifeless siren out of the foam with melancholy licks. The mauled corpse belongs to the blonde beauty (Maria Rohm) the protagonist once saw in Istanbul: "Was it last week... last month... or last year? Man, I tell you, time is like the ocean..." The Marienbad tableau of unblinking bourgeois ghouls presents a playboy (Klaus Kinski), an art dealer (Dennis Price) and a fashion photographer (Margaret Lee) as ravishers, Darren witnesses the vampiristic orgy and decides to leave Byzantine decadence for Rio's carnival fervor. Rohm turns up as a luscious apparition, bare under her mink coat and ready for revenge. "How can you run from a dead person unless you're dead yourself," muses the jazz player, underlining the Ulmer-like sense of irrational helplessness. Jesús Franco pivots it all on Vertigo's deathly-muse-versus-earthly-confidante schism, deranged into his own web of death and resurrection, haphazard zooms and dissolving spaces. The eternal feminine through slow-motion and psychedelic filters, Donne's sonnet and Picasso's Girl Before a Mirror. A feel for filmic form closer to music or hypnotism (cf. Robbe-Grillet's L'Immortelle), turbaned Kinski in the harem is possibly a nod to Lang. Can demonic lust be part of the "normal woman," Balzac wonders of the Succubus. Franco salutes the idea, Barbara McNair sings it: "Venus in furs will be smiling, when the moment arrives..." With Adolfo Lastretti, Paul Muller, and Manfred Mann.