Kinky Kicks

Henri-Georges Clouzot (The Wages of Fear, Diabolique) is a French film maker whose stock in trade is grafting psychological aberrations onto standard and somewhat sleazy melodrama. In La Prisonniere, his first film in eight years, Clouzot once again mixes an ordinary story with kinky characters, a soupc,on of violence, and a touch of Krafft-Ebing just to add some spice. The result is pat, predictable and more than a little distasteful.

In fact, the story of La Prisonniere is downright repugnant. The mistress (Elisabeth Wiener) of a with-it artist (Bernard Fresson) falls for the owner of her lover's gallery. The owner (Laurent Terzieff) looks like the sort of tubercular pervert who might peddle pornographic pictures to schoolchildren, but he gets his kicks from having fun with adults. He ties his girls in chains, photographs them in submissive attitudes, fondles and then bullies them into abject sexual surrender. The whole thing is pretty disgusting, what with the heroine being degraded, her lover becoming murderously outraged, and the dirty young man sadomasochistically savoring their traumas.

Despite its director's reputation, La Prisonniere is the kind of skin-flick that rarely makes it off the grind-house circuit. But this film is being released in the U.S. by Joseph E. Levine, a canny showman with a shrewd instinct for profitable exploitation. Five years ago, the only chained-up people in Levine movies were Mediterranean musclemen and Nubian slaves. From this standpoint at least, La Prisonniere marks a certain kind of progress.

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