Spostamenti progressivi del piacere

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.

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.

A young woman is interrogated by the police and the judges,suspected of being a modern witch.The girl who shared her apartment has been found dead with a pair of scissors impaled through her heart,as she lay attached to the bedposts.Apparently,the girl does have powers,to make all people around her fall prey to her spell,glissing progressively into desire,lust and the unknown.Alain Robbe-Grillet has to be one of the most innovative French novelists and film-makers.His "Successive Slidings of Pleasure" is a wonderful film that contains plenty of surreal moments and lots of sleaze.The movie itself is truly unique and bizarre,so fans of unusual European art-house exploitation won't be disappointed.So if you are a fan of Jean Rollin's works give this one a look.This is my first journey into Alain Robbe-Grillet's visions and I'm highly impressed!

Although this was made before writer/film director Alain Robbe-Grillet's slightly less obscure "Playing with Fire", it is even more deranged, surrealistic, perverse, and non-narrative than that one. It kind of resembles the early French surrealist films of Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali except that it is in color and contains Robbe-Grillet's usual manipulation of time and narrative (see "Last Year at Marienbad" or any of his novels). The film seems to be about a young student who is questioned by both police and religious authorities after her roommate is found bound and murdered. Except it's not clear that her roommate is actually a real person or just a mannequin in a bizarre art piece, and it's not even really clear whether she's being questioned after or BEFORE she commits this "murder".

Like several other French filmmakers of this era, Robbe-Grillet got away with making such an experimental, non-narrative feature by adding softcore sexploitation elements, but he doesn't "sell out" as much to the sexploitation angle as some of his country-men like Jean Rollin or Walerian Borowzyx (which might be one of the reason his films are a lot harder to find today). There is very little straight erotic sex in this film; instead there is a kind of extreme polymorphous perversity that at times is pretty disturbing. There are A LOT of scenes of both women and female mannequins in sadomasochist/bondage poses and splattered with blood or red paint. There is also a little bit of "Lolita-ism". The main star, Anicee Alvina, is a beautiful girl with a great body (a long, strange scene where she covers her glorious full-frontal nakedness with red paint and makes "self-portraits" by pressing herself against the white walls of her cell is especially memorable), but she was only in her late teens/early 20's here and could certainly pass for younger, especially since Robbe-Grillet often has her dressed (when he has her dressed at all, that is) in a "baby doll" outfit or a Catholic schoolgirl uniform.

Aside from Alvina this movie doesn't have the "name" cast of "Playing with Fire" (i.e. Sylvia Kristel, Agostina Belli). It does, however, feature an early appearance by Isabelle Huppert, who is now probably THE most respected actress in France. (This is kind of like finding out that Meryl Streep was once in a softcore porno "art" film early in her career, but then Huppert has always been a much more daring actress than Streep). I'm not sure which character Huppert plays exactly--I think she's one the protagonist's school-mates since she was would have been even younger than Alvina back then.

Very interesting film--I'd recommend it to any fan of arty, weird, and/or perverted films.

Before the opening credits were over, I could tell that this was going to be an impenetrable piece of pretentious arthouse garbage. I don't usually like to use the word pretentious - it's a lazy epithet - but in this case, it has never been more apt: the whole film is up itself.

I watched it on the mistaken belief that it was a horror film; it's not. Exactly what it is is anyone's guess - the surreal story is so abstract and the treatment so avant-garde that it's hard to work out what director Alain Robbe-Grillet's intention was.

If the film wasn't French and from the '70s, I would have guessed that the whole thing was a parody of French '70s arthouse cinema, but it isn't: this is the real deal. Perhaps if the film was condensed to twenty minutes of the weirdest moments (whilst retaining the gratuitous nudity, of course), I wouldn't hate it quite as much as I do, but at a whopping 105 minutes, it is an excruciatingly, dull watch.

Due to a technical hitch, I had to view the last twenty minutes or so without subtitles, but it didn't make a whole lot of difference: I had long given up trying to make sense of it all.

1/10. One of the worst films I have ever seen.