Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 08/10/24

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Saturday, August 10, 2024

The Story of O (Just Jaeckin, 1975)

Udo Kier and Corinne Cléry in The Story of O

Cast: Corinne Cléry, Udo Kier, Anthony Steel, Jean Gaven, Christiane Minazzoli, Martine Kelly, Jean-Pierre Andréani, Gabriel Cattand, Li Sellgren, Albane Navizet, Nadine Perles, Laure Moutoussamy. Screenplay: Sébastien Japrisot, based on a novel by Dominique Aubry as Pauline Réage. Cinematography: Robert Fraisse, Yves Rodallec. Art direction: Jean-Baptiste Poirot. Film editing: Francine Pierre. Music: Pierre Bachelet.

The interiority of novels is what makes them so difficult to film. The characters and action of a novel exist only in the mind of the reader encountering them on the page. When we see those characters and that action on the screen, they usually have a very different effect, especially when the novel and the film deal with sex. When The Story of O, a novel written by a woman, was transferred to the screen by a director who's a man, the "male gaze" inevitably informed the movie, particularly because the story is about a woman submitting to sadomasochistic discipline. So the film, whose subject matter and abundant female nudity got it banned in Britain and labeled NC-17 in the States, was also subject to charges that it was antifeminist. There are those who assert that it's actually a feminist fable, since O (Corinne Cléry) is given frequent opportunities to escape from her submissive role and asserts her equality, if not dominance, at the film's end, but they seem to be in a minority. In any case, The Story of O is not a very good movie. It's drenched in soft-core porn clichés and its soft-focus photography gives it a candy-box ambiance. On the page, the novel could be intellectually and erotically provocative. But on the screen it's just tedious and repetitive.