La prisonnière

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.

Opening with the most eerie and perverse credit sequence you are ever likely to see, HG Clouzot's final film veers from claustrophobic mind games to swooning romance to 60s Pop Art psychedelia - without ever once losing the iron grip that was its director's trademark. It's Clouzot, and not the prolific but overrated Claude Chabrol, who deserves to be called 'the French Hitchcock.' Yet Clouzot, uninhibited by the demands of Hollywood 'box office,' was able to plumb depths of misanthropy and depravity that Hitch could scarcely dream of.

In La Prisonniere, he achieves the complete emotional and moral annihilation of all three protagonists. A young wife (Elisabeth Wiener) grows bored with her philandering artist husband (Bernard Fresson) and falls under the spell of a voyeuristic gallery owner (Laurent Terzieff) - who dabbles in kinky S&M photos on the side. If that sounds like a recipe for disaster...well, it is - but never quite in the ways we predict. The flamboyantly deranged Terzieff may, in fact, be the sanest character in this twisted triangle. So how crazy are the heroine and her hubby...?

Suffice it to say that, having produced an erotic and psychological thriller that outclasses any of Chabrol's more famous efforts of the late 60s, Clouzot then enters the tormented mind of his heroine - in a psychedelic 'head trip' to rival Kubrick's finale to 2001. A pity that Elisabeth Wiener (a forgotten 60s beauty in the style of Charlotte Rampling or Marianne Faithfull) never quite suggests the depths of anguish her role demands. Still, the magnificent Terzieff supplies angst enough for the whole cast. And he's not even the mad one...

David Melville

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.

In France they sell this movie in a DVD-collection called The Unclassifyables. Not without reason, as it is indeed very difficult to say what this movie is exactly about. In my opinion it is an early critical comment on post modernism and deconstructivism – terms coined by French philosophers that became public property only years if not decades after this movie was made. The director sees what the world is coming to - and he does not like it. In this aspect La Prisonniere reminded me very much of Jacques Tati's movies Mon Oncle and Playtime.

Clouzot also seems to have been influenced here by Michelangelo Antonioni's movies Il Deserto Rosso and Blow-Up. Alienation and disorientation are rampant in all major characters. Apparently it is Clouzot's first movie in color - and it is one of the most impressive color movies I have seen ever. This director was always great with surfaces and textures. Here he adds undisturbed expanses of bright primary or secondary colors to his vocabulary. They are prominent in the greatest scenes, a playful chase on a beach (someone pours a bucket of red paint or blood into the water) and a climactic final scene on a rooftop in the center of Paris. In the house opposite the roof, a gigantic, heavy turn-of-the-century stone structure, all the exterior textile blinds are drawn so that it is sprinkled with tiny crimson squares. In a strange way color whenever it appears as a statement seems to mean artificiality in a negative sense, and the prime affliction of the main female character seems to be a kind of a color sickness. She goes through an interesting choice of different dresses.

I think La Prisonnière is a great artistic statement about the end of true artistic achievement. It takes the viewer to a fantasy world in which dreams and desires are bound turn into unbearable nightmares. The quick editing and ultra short insertions had other reviewers describe this movie as „psychedelic". I doubt that a psychedelic experience was what the director intended. I think he rather wanted to warn against the exaggerated input of images post modern society is subjected to. The fantastic, terrifically edited train ride of the main couple at the beginning of the movie seems to indicate as much.

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.