Contrainte par corps

A female version of "midnight express" the posters claim ;wishful thinking!it's also and mainly another version of the hackneyed subject "women in jail where you can get an eyeful".This may be based on a true life story ,it does not make a good movie for all that : almost all the prisoners are sexy and good-looking (Tanya Lopert and Lisette Malidor look like models),and the unfortunate heroine (Marianne Basler) is particularly gorgeous:unfairy imprisoned ,because of a vicious peeping tom cop (Vittorio Mezzogiorno) ,she is thrown into a prison which does not look at all with the hell depicted in "midnight express" .

Serge Leroy (who had made worthwhile works in the past :"La Traque" and "Attention Les Enfants Regardent ") desperately tries to make up for the soft porn side of his film by painting the portrait of an ambiguous cop :admittedly ,he is a sadist who gets fun by persecuting his victim but he talks of his mother ,"who has made a cake for the prisoner" ,we see him enter a church ,kneel and pray;in another context ,it could have been convincing ,here it amounts to nothing .

Both principals are talented actors ,here lost in an incredible story ;Basler and Mezzogiorno would meet again in the following year ,in "La Révolution Française " as Mrs Danton and Marat.

The story of this French 1988 b-movie is about a female tourist who becomes an inmate of a female prison island in North Africa innocently and fights for her rights and against any kind of oppression and corruption. Nothing really new, but the usual female prison plot, but directed very well and without the usual cheap thrills of that genre. There is not much sex, not much nudity, and the well-known lesbian sex scenes and violent fights are reduced to the minimum.

Director Serge Leroy is rather interested in the story of his female hero, her feelings and her relationship to her inmate friends and a corrupt policeman who is constantly humiliating her without success. There is much more focus on the characters than in similar genre productions, and together with Marianne Basler's good performance, a calmed-down, but still very thrilling plot and the exotic settings of a lonely island, this production is worth being watched not only by exploitation movie buffs.

I don't know why, but after the first twenty minutes, I thought about L'AVEU, from director Costa Gavras. First, it takes place in a foreign country, an unknown foreign country, where freedom of speak and act is not the most common word...See what I mean? It is not really connected to a political matter, but not so far either. I am a bit surprised that this film is partly directed by Serge Leroy, I don't recognize his trademark here. It is a strange film, not uninteresting, but some ingredient is missing, I quite don't know exactly what. I did not know this film, and am happy to have discovered it. This unknown country settings scheme reminds me another French movie: LES AVEUX LES PLUS DOUX, from director Edouard Molinaro. A rather close plot, made in (1971). In terms of woman's prison, this is a really bad movie, nothing to do with CAGED nor WOMAN'S PRISON ....The scenes between the inmates are totally lame, terrible, it looks like some nude prison films, exploitation grindhouse material from the seventies.