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Aesthetic fads come and go, says Henri-Georges Clouzot, obsessive desire remains eternal. The opening goes into Argento's Deep Red, dolls in roving close-up waiting to be molested, a rubber torso is squeezed until it undulates like an odalisque. "A voyeur, but a blind one" (Laurent Terzieff), his goal is to present the public with a gallery not unlike "a supermarket of art." His friend (Bernard Fresson) specializes in kinetic sculptures, and in disrespecting the masters. (Picasso? "Carbonisé." "Carbonisé?" "Car-bo-ni-sé.") Images are everything to the boss, his slide show is the modern magic lantern, the word "rien" yields to a chained nude and inflames the curiosity of the artist's wife (Élisabeth Wiener). She sits in one of his photograph sessions, and the studio vibrates with danger—the tripod clangs, the hanging lamp glares, the camera's shutter crackles. Submission trumps beauty, "shame is part of the pleasure." The old jaundiced eye in the permissive new world, fully attuned to the bourgeois lass working through her blur of disgust and ecstasy. Zooms and jump-cuts galore, abstract forms during a train ride, "so stimulating..." Celebrity glimpses at the Paris exhibition, a sweaty interlude with Dany Carrel in a transparent raincoat. Splashes, spirals, grids. "Nice Vasarely, no? Looks like a cage." The masochist's awakening and the sadist's cowardice, blood spilled on a little parody of Lelouch lyricism. The pervert defends his notion of love on the edge of the abyss, the wife meanwhile collides with an update of Tolstoy, psychedelic fireworks unspool within the mangled mind. "The artistic needs of our time," Clouzot's last skewer. A nexus of connections, Belle de Jour, Persona, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Petulia, Une Femme Douce, La Femme Infidèle...
--- Fernando F. Croce |