La prisonnière

Elisabeth Wiener is in an open marriage with artist Bernard Fresson. His work is part of an exhibition by art dealer Laurent Terzieff to promote his becoming a 'supermarket of modern art' to sell to all the people who are moving into apartments and need something to put on their walls: lots of kinetic op-art. While Fresso goes off with a drunk art critic to earn better reviews, Mlle Weiner accepts an invitation from Terzieff to see the art he has at home. Surprising to her, there are a lot of primitive native pieces, quite distinct from the sort of thing he sells. He shows her his own artistic side, which is a slide show of words from manuscripts, showing the different way that different writers write 'rien'... and a nude woman in a strikingly submissive position. She leaves, then visits him in his office, where he explains that everyone likes to take orders, to submit, to be relieved of the responsibility of making decisions. First with a model, then on her own, Mlle Wiener returns to Terzieff's apartment, falling in love with him, submitting to him.

Henri-Georges Clouzot's last complete movie is another one in a long series in which he makes it clear he has absolute contempt for humanity. Here he attempts to show us why we are so contemptible, how we fool ourselves into degradation, how we excuse ourselves, and fool no one but ourselves. His technique here is a lot colder than when he began to do this in the 1940s. It looked to me as if this was his reaction to Michael Powell's PEEPING TOM except he offers no excuses, no reasons why people are the way they are. He just shows them as he sees them, and allows us to draw our own conclusions.

What this film lacks in substance is certainly made up for in the starling and typically 1968 visuals. The subject may be BDSM and voyeurism but the look is pure 60s kinetic and op-art. The portrayal as Stan as an obsessive photographer exploring his deeply felt notions of dominance and submission are somewhat muted by his role as art gallery owner, dealing in shimmering and revolving metallic sculptures and rightly coloured geometric shapes. Nevertheless he does a decent job of convincing and some of the photography scenes with his 'little housewife' turned adventuress and submissive are effective. The reliance on great flamboyant splashes of orange and yellow throughout encourage a smile rather than a concern and it is as if Clouzot himself is conflicted. Not the greatest film on the subject, it is certainly no Belle de Jour and despite the arty use of colour, no Blow Up, but still well worth a watch.

La prisonnière was HG Clouzot's final film and his only in colour. It tells the story of a young female film editor who meets an art dealer via her relationship with an abstract artist. She discovers he photographs erotic pictures of women. Partially appalled, partially intrigued she becomes hooked on his voyeurism and becomes one of his subjects. Its story focuses on themes of submission and dominance, with all three central characters at war with one and other to some extent.

I don't think the message was necessarily altogether clear at times and I think something must have been lost over the years in terms of the shock we are meant to feel at the erotic material. From the perspective of nowadays in the free-for-all that is the internet age, those images that presumably would have caused some shock back in 1968 seem actually quite quaint by today's anything-goes standards. So you do sort of have to remind yourself that this was a very different world back then in order to understand aspects such as this. I felt on the whole that the story seemed a bit under-developed and not entirely satisfying but what certainly did not disappoint me was the visual aesthetics on display. Considering this was Clouzot's only colour movie, it does have to be said that he embraces the medium in a pretty full-on way. The use of colour is rather splendid throughout. The early gallery scenes are visually delightful with much abstract, expressionistic and pop art imagery present throughout, all beautifully framed, while the closing psychedelic hallucination sequence was a mesmerizing example of visual artistry. So, for me at least, this is a film which is mostly of interest from an aesthetic point-of-view as opposed to a dramatic one. It definitely felt like the work of a young director, as opposed to a veteran, and so indicates the boldness that Clouzot had even in his final years. It's the sort of material that someone like Claude Chabrol could easily have been tackling at the time, except Clouzot's film is visually much more out there than anything that young new wave director every delivered. On the whole, this is a pretty impressively uncompromising bit of cinema for Clouzot to bow out on and is certainly one that should be of interest for anyone interested not only in French cinema of the period but of counter-cultural time-capsule movies as well.

Clouzot's last film, (and his only completed film in colour), takes him, perhaps, further away from the mainstream than almost anything he had done previously and this, being the late sixties, allowed him a much greater freedom of expression in terms of content. "La Prisonniere", or "Woman in Chains", may not be the late masterpiece some might have hoped for but it certainly didn't deserve its fate of almost disappearing from view entirely. It's not really a thriller but a tale of obsession as artist's wife and television journalist Elisabeth Wiener develops an unhealthy attachment to art dealer Laurent Terzieff after catching husband Bernard Fresson being unfaithful; (she's also doing a documentary on women being abused). Its setting also gives Clouzot the opportunity to indulge his passion for art in all its glorious forms and seldom has a director dipped into colour so imaginatively first time out; this is a fabulous looking film.

Its languid pace may dissipate its potential for suspense but as a tale of a sadomasochistic relationship it does exert a creepy fascination that says as much about Clouzot as any of his previous films, more so in fact; this is confessional cinema at its most extreme which probably accounts for its failure. Had he lived and had the studios let him I can see Hitchcock going down the same road, ditching suspense entirely and leaving just the psychology. There is no denying its brilliance but I just wish I could have liked this more. This odd blend of Hitchcock, Bergman, Antonioni and Michael Powell's "Peeping Tom" finally bites off more than it can chew.

I am giving this film a 10 because I can see that it is, in its own horrific way, a masterpiece. It's title ' Woman in Chains ' is misplaced, as it deals as the French title says about being imprisoned. How it is to being imprisoned to destructive desires that can lead to a living hell within that borders on death and madness. It is in my opinion a film to be endured, and not to be enjoyed in any way whatsoever. It is set in an art gallery in Paris, run by a man, superbly played by Laurent Terzieff who gets his addictive fix out of making women utterly submissive to his desires. Clouzot with his cold eye shows us how certain aspects of Modernism in art can be revealing of the nothingness within that people can fall into. Kinetic art with its flashing lights and movements folds mechanically into destroying others as well as oneself. His argument is persuasive, as set against this background women are used and mentally tortured, and clearly the film is also an experiment on how to use Conceptual art on film. The ending is shocking and gruelling, and those who see this work have to be prepared to cope with it. I saw it in Paris and was so disturbed by Clouzot's vision of human beings being slaves of willing masters ( mainly heterosexual, but hints of male homosexuality and Lesbianism are thrown in ) that I walked the streets all night to avoid nightmares. And of course the masters of domination are equally submissive to their own domination. A hard film that was prescient of future decades, and it is not just about the latter part of the 1960's. A must see for those who can endure its joyless depiction of warped eroticism.