Deslizamientos progresivos del placer

The French film Glissements progressifs du plaisir (1974) was shown in the U. S. with the translated title Successive Slidings of Pleasure. It was written and directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet.

The movie stars Anicée Alvina as Alice, who may or may not have killed another woman by stabbing her with a pair of scissors. Alice is locked up in a strange institution that is part convent, part prison, and part dungeon.

Anicée Alvina is very beautiful, and when director Robbe-Grillet tires of showing us her high cheekbones, he shows us her nude body. When he tires of that, he returns to the cheekbones. There's plenty of nudity from other beautiful women as well.

OK--it's a movie with continual nudity. However, it slides into necrophilia, and that's really, really creepy. Truth in reviewing--I stopped watching the movie at that point, so I don't know how it ends.

This film has a feeble IMDb rating of 6.2. However, I want to warn potential viewers to find another film. Because of that wish, I rated it 1.

SPOLILERS...kind of.

There is so much going on in this movie it's hard to know where to start. The key is a line where the girl's lawyer says, "All who approach you are perverts, insane. But it's all in your little mind." Looked at in that context, the "plot" means nothing since it's more about thoughts than action.

That said, the central character, called only "The Prisoner" is arrested for the murder of her lover, Nora. The two are in a Domme/sub, BDSM relationship with The Prisoner portrayed as the Dominant.

Many characters take on double meanings. The police, it seems to me, represent the author, asking supposedly meaningless questions that would only make sense if you were creating a rich background life for a character such as The Prisoner. One of the cops, rather than documenting the crime, blatantly records the themes of the movie: "Themes of broken bottles". Bottles stand in for the wombs and this refers the broken mother/daughter relationship between...

...The Prisoner and Nora. Nora is her mother. The same cop that records themes rather than evidence, has a scene where he recites words while writing and researching something (probably the screenplay being filmed) in the bed Nora was killed in. This is crosscut with The Prisoner being show objects and free associating. The cop says "parricide". The Prisoner says "disassociation".

Throughout the movie, Nora seems the submissive except for one scene - when the Prisoner sells herself to a man looking for deviant sex. She takes them up to the room. Nora lounges in a window seat. Stepping back, the actual "plot" revolves around Mother Nora selling and sexually abusing her daughter.

Her court-appointed lawyer (read "protector") is played by the same actress that plays Nora. At first, Nora acts like the mother The Prisoner wants/needs - strict and no-nonsense. But, The Prisoner's insanity seduces Lawyer/Mom/Nora, or at least that's the scenario The Prisoner dreams up. The Prisoner ends up killing Lawyer/Mom/Nora in very similar circumstances.

Plot-wise, the police find that Nora was NOT killed by the prisoner. They come to tell The Prisoner this and find The Lawyer dead. "We'll have to start over", the cop says.

What the director presents to us is a portrait of The Prisoner, deep in the clutches of her disassociation, creating a world that's easier for her to live in - where she controls her mother, dressing her as a manikin and, just by thinking about it, causes people to die. It's complex, gorgeous and, if not actual porn, has enough nudity to satisfy that requirement if that's what you're looking for.

Not as instantly likable as Trans-Europ-Express but just as beautifully photographed, this time in colour, and if we do not follow every nuance at least we believe the writer/director does. So there is no suggestion that we are being led down any garden path, just that Robbe-Grillet's obsessions are maybe not quite the same as our own. This seemed fine at first and as with the aforementioned film, I was happy enough with the various 'truths' being offered and didn't panic. As things become more religious, however, with suggestions of witchcraft, I felt myself becoming more distant. This may work differently for others but I just wasn't interested enough in that side of things. Priests, nuns and catholic guilt are all very fine but are not one of my concerns. Has to be said that the gorgeous ladies here are perfectly happy to remove their clothes and the usual S&M trappings we associate with the director are much to the fore. Not all bad then.

Few are those movies I've seen that so emphatically push down any strong, clear sense of narrative. There is indeed a narrative here, but it is loose, and broad, even as the specifics are many and joyously devious. 'Successive slidings of pleasure,' or 'Glissements progressifs du plaisir,' is effectively the portrait of a deeply troubled and twisted young woman. What, here, is reality? What is her perception of it, or her imagination of it, or her deliberately misleading description of it? Whatever small thread there may be that ties together successive scenes, most imagery feels so wildly detached from one moment to the next that one might reasonably question if there is truly any rhyme or reason to it at all. And still this is cohesive and whole, however wildly abstruse it may get - and peculiarly mesmerizing.

There's a sense of exploitation to the feature in the substantial nudity, suggested sex acts, and the protagonist's lurid dialogue, yet it is pointedly muted, and rendered almost abstract by the intensely contorted storytelling. Similarly, there's a sense of horror promulgated in the suggested violence, the devilish manipulation or deception of other characters, and the gnarly, convoluted tangle of the prisoner's psychology, but this too is mangled, broken and reformed into only the most curious of shapes. Above all, 'Successive slidings of pleasure' is 100% an art film: imagery and scenes constructed with the same creative eye and mind as a painter at a canvas, or a sculptor before an untamed slab of stone; storytelling informed by the lofty pretension of a poet whose every word and phrase must have hidden meaning (or does it?), whose very arrangement of lines in a precise structure surely portend something more (or do they?). Are there Big Ideas lurking behind the assemblage here? Or is it "simply" as it seems, a web of nigh incomprehensible sex, violence, dark fantasy, and finessed craftsmanship?

I've never seen anything quite like this, and I suppose the average viewer hasn't, either. The appeal is likely minimal except for those open to all the wide, weird variety cinema has to offer. Yet it's plainly beautiful, fascinating, and jarring, all at once. The cinematography, the editing, the writing and direction; the production design, the art direction, the costume design, the hair and makeup; the music, the extraordinary cast, their splendid performances of poise and nuance - everything here is bent towards masterful, subtle artistry, manifesting an odd atmosphere of tension and unease even as the presentation could hardly be more dreamlike. And it's exquisite - bold, visionary, gorgeous, fabulous.

It's a lot to take in and process at every turn, but for those willing and able to actively engage with such ambitious, grandiose fare, it's exceptional, and highly rewarding. Only by chance did I stumble onto this, but I could hardly be happier that I did: 'Successive slidings of pleasure' is an utter delight.

A young woman is interviewed by police, judges and clergy who may not all be real over possibly murdering her flatmate. She makes art on naked bodies and mannequins and is probably a prostitute but also might be a witch. That's almost all the plot there is, all you'll get from me at any rate but suffice to say, those looking for conventional narrative and clear cut explanations will not have a good time here. This here is more of a delving into the mysteries of mind and memory, an exploration of fractured mind framed in the trappings of Euro-sploitation, its time-line treading forwards, backwards and even sideways from its central bloody death, the effect being that past, present and future become as one, the film itself becomes an image of mind trapped in misgiving and illusion. Its tricksy stuff and can be daunting but the key is in the source, writer/director Alain Robbe-Grillet is generally best known for writing Last Year In Marienbad and while Successive Slidings of Pleasure may be less profound than that marvel of philosophical mystery it shares in its concerns and structure of film as headstate rather than means of surveying from outside. It is also marginally more penetrable than the earlier film, with its various flashbacks and repeated images acting as useful clues to orient the audience in the journey. Not that its symbolism or connections are all that easy to piece together, but they serve as a whole to create a relatively cohesive if slippery mind image at the close of play, a print on the brain that doesn't necessarily require many viewings to interpret and report upon. The major difference from Last Year In Marienbad though is the sleaze. Sure, there aren't any Franco style cooch zooms, but the leading lady (stunning Anicee Alvina) is always seductive and often nude, even painting her body to print red upon the floor or smear herself across white walls. She paints the body of her flatmate (Olga Georges-Picot, also stunning) too and together they get up to some winningly strange behaviour including a breathtaking scene involving eggs and a truly bizarre bit of doll mutilation. The bloodier bits are eyebrow raising as well, sensual but never gratuitous. At times things get a little too pretentious, with one scene towards the end a real groaner (coming across as the work of an imbecile parody of the avant garde) and the film as a whole a tad overlong, but mostly this is really splendid stuff. Speech delivered straight to camera, formal body language, terrific sound design with mismatched soundtrack sometimes illustrating thought and other times just letting scenes bleed into each other, its a great trip for sense and mind. Probably something of a niche audience film, but if you fall into that spot on the Venn diagram where philosophers and kooky sleaze-hounds converge, this is a must see. 8/10.