French
master of suspense Henri-Georges Clouzot was at the height of his career after
teaming up with Brigitte Bardot on the courtroom drama La Vérité. Actress Bardot’s
biggest box office success to date and third most popular film released in
France in 1960, the film went on to garner an Academy Award nomination for Best
Foreign Language Film and also won the Golden Globe for the same. Despite hitting a home run with La Vérité, it would mark the beginning
of the end of the master filmmaker’s ride on the crest wave of success and
happiness with seemingly one insurmountable obstacle after another driving him
into the trough.
Starting
with a heart attack suffered by the director (the first of many) which shut
down production on La Vérité for a
week, things took a nose dive for Clouzot when his wife Vera Clouzot died of a
heart attack shortly after La Vérité
completed shooting. After falling in and
out of depression following Vera’s death, the director found himself boxed
between a rock and a hard place as his films garnered renowned international
attention while the French New Wave directors scoffed at his work. Believing his own films Diabolique and Miquette to
have lost their relevancy, in 1964 Clouzot set his sights on the experimental
and kinetic thriller of sexual jealousy L’Enfer.
Ambitious
in scope and fixing to be the director’s first color film, actors Romy
Schneider and Serge Reggiani were cast with longtime cinematographer Armand
Thirard providing many of the experimental kinetic, kaleidoscopic imagery. Three
weeks into shooting, however (as chronicled in the excellent documentary Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno), Reggiani
dropped out before Clouzot suffered a heart attack and production fell
apart. Leaving the preproduction work
and dailies for L’Enfer behind, for
the next two years Clouzot kept himself busy working on television documentaries,
earning just enough money to finance what would become his first color film and
final directing project, La Prisonnière.
Utilizing
most of (if not all) the props and camera tests created for the abandoned L’Enfer project and proving to be the
master of suspense’s first thoroughly provocative picture, La Prisonnière (translated to Woman
in Chains) inhabits a curious hemisphere somewhere in the sadomasochistic
yearnings of Bunuel’s Belle De Jour with
the psychedelic abstractions of Kubrick’s 2001:
A Space Odyssey. Hallucinatory and
tantalizing, the film doesn’t quite deliver on the promise of his abandoned L’Enfer yet still finds the director
pushing the envelope dividing (at the time) the invisible line between art and
pornography.
Zeroing
in on a young couple, TV editor José (actress/singer Élisabeth Wiener) and her avant-garde artist boyfriend
Gilbert (Bernard Fresson), the duo wind up at dandy Parisian art gallery owner
Stanislas’ (Laurent Terzieff) establishment to show off Gilbert’s work. After spotting Gilbert mingling with an art
critic a bit too closely for comfort, an annoyed José decides to head home with
Stanislas to his ornate flat. In the
midst of showing off his photography works, José’s uncharted sexual curiosities
are aroused by the sight of a lewd image of a naked woman in bondage. Though initially disgusted, eventually José’s
intrigue persists, leading her deeper into a bottomless pit of sadomasochistic
subservience.
Either a story of true love or the
uncompromising portrait of an impressionable youth groomed to be another man’s
willing sexual submissive, the final feature film of Henri-Georges Clouzot La Prisonnière is at once a psychedelic
psychosexual odyssey and a semi-autobiographical work of self-examination with much
of the director’s trademark dispassionate fastidiousness channeled into the
character of Stanislas. Many have read La Prisonnière as exemplar of Clouzot
turning the camera on himself and while that might be true to some extent, with
the opening montage of Stanislas fiddling with the doll of a naked woman, the
film leaves ample room for reinterpretation for the viewer.
Like Belle De Jour, the film is less interested in the mechanics of sex
than it is in the hypnotic pull its protagonist cannot break free from. How we should regard the events of La Prisonnière from a moral standpoint
are secondary to the tractor-beam like allure the netherworld presents to our
heroine. Coupled with Andréas Winding’s visually striking, precise
cinematography and hyperkinetic editing by Noëlle Balenci, La Prisonnière careens slowly and surely
towards its shattering finale which, like any challenging work by a great
director, poses far more questions than it answers.
The film’s three leads of course give
superb performances with Wiener serving as Stanislas’ (and arguably Clouzot’s) willing
muse. Better known as Allié
de Viva in Jacques Rivette’s Duelle,
Wiener traverses fearlessly into (at the time) some pretty uncomfortable territory
with Laurent Terzieff imbuing Stanislas with implacable menace. Also strong is Bernard Fresson as starving
artist Gilbert who may or may not be onto his girlfriend’s illicit activities
with Stanislas. For those who recall
Clouzot’s failed attempt at L’Enfer,
Dany Carrel makes a welcome return before the director’s camera as Stanislas’ nude
photography model.
As with L’Enfer,
Clouzot’s final feature film was dogged with the same production problems that
derailed his last from completion. Despite
his reassurance to doctors and insurers he was fine, Clouzot started shooting
in September 1967 only to suffer yet another heart attack followed by a
seven-month hospitalization before hastily resuming production in August of
1968. Not long after completion, Clouzot’s
health continued to decline with numerous unrealized projects tinkered with for
the next seven years. After an
open-heart surgery in November 1976, Henri-Georges Clouzot died in January 12th,
1977.
With many of Clouzot’s works finally
receiving their long awaited international releases following the documentary
film Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno which
gave cinephiles a glimpse into what might have been his first color feature, La Prisonnière finally had it’s day in
the UK thanks to a 4K restored blu-ray disc with plans from Kino Lorber to
release the disc in the US later this year.
Looking back at the director’s somewhat scandalous swan song, La Prisonnière wouldn’t be the
recommended starting point for newcomers to the genius that is Henri-Georges
Clouzot (that honor will always go to The
Wages of Fear for me). That said,
fans of the distinguished French master of suspense should most certainly give
the director’s hyperkinetic psychosexual odyssey a whirl which is sure to leave
one Hell of an impression.
Score:
- Andrew Kotwicki