by Allan Fish
(France 1968 104m) DVD2 (France only, no English subs)
Aka. Woman in Chains
I’m not much fun
p Robert Dorfman d/w Henri-Georges Clouzot ph Andréas Winding ed Noëlle Balenci art Jacques Saulnier
Elisabeth Wiener (Josée David), Laurent Terzief (Stan Hassler), Bernard Fresson (Gilbert Moreau), Dany Carrel (Maguy), Noëlle Adam (Josée’s mother), Claude Piéplu (Josée’s father), Michel Etcheverry (surgeon), Daniel Rivière (Maurice), Joanna Shimkus, Charles Vanel, Michel Piccoli,
Bearing in mind the history of Clouzot’s previous two films, La Véritè and the unfinished L’Enfer, it’s hard not to watch the opening scene of his final film without equating the master to his protagonist. It’s a nothing scene really, a man in glasses with a miniature doll in his hand, whose white cloth top he pulls down to reveal her breasts.
As with his friend Hitchcock there was always something voyeuristic about Clouzot, so it’s hard not to imagine him as the photographer snapping Suzy Delair in Le Quai des Orfèvres or directing Bardot in La Vérité and wishing he could do as with the doll, but had to content himself with a blink and you’ll miss it flash instead. Following the death of his actress wife Vera in 1960, Clouzot descended to a dark obsessive place. The surviving footage of L’Enfer show a masochistic voyeurism towards his female stars, with a naked Romy Schneider tied to a train track – bear that in mind watching La Prisonnière – and behind the scenes footage showing the cameraman taking an interest in Dany Carrel’s breasts making an escape bid from her top. There’s something psychedelic about the colour filters used in L’Enfer that Clouzot returned to in La Prisonnière, and it wasn’t the only thing that would return. Carrel would be back, too.
Wiener and Fresson play Josée and Gilbert, a married couple but with a certain arrangement that kept their marriage open to whatever infidelities they liked, so long as they told each other about them. While Gilbert is off in Josée’s car trying to sweet talk an art critic into bed to get a favourable review for his exhibit, Josée goes with the gallery owner Stan to his apartment for a drink, where Stan offers to show his photos. Nothing seems untoward; the photos are of the differences to be interpreted in handwriting, but in amongst them the slide projector contains a shot of a naked woman in chains. Josée laughs, then wonders if the ‘mistake’ was deliberate. She takes another look.
The film then follows Josée as she becomes increasingly obsessed with the photo and begins to feel that she, too, wants to submit to Stan’s camera. The turning point is a session where Josée watches on as Stan photographs Maguy, firstly undressing, then topless, then in a transparent raincoat. There’s no actual sex involved, indeed the film as a whole is quite chaste, but it’s one of the most erotic scenes in French film, with Carrel’s Maguy getting quite literally hot and bothered under the coat and Josée watching on with a mixture of revulsion and desire. It’s the first step on her road to ruin, and while the perversion that lies at its centre may seem alien, Clouzot illustrates how love and desire make fools of us all, making us do things that otherwise we wouldn’t countenance.
Essentially, La Prisonnière is a psychological treatise on the nature of voyeurism and how we are driven, through our uncontrollable passions to extremities. While it isn’t really a film about performances, Wiener (looking like a less curvy Scarlett Johansson) does well as the tortured heroine, fighting with herself like an addict going cold turkey, while Carrel is a matter-of-fact sexy delight as the paid S&M model. A thesis could be written on the colour design alone, while it climaxes with a delirious subconscious nightmare which outdoes anything dreamt up let alone shot by Hitch. Some may accuse the film of toppling into absurdity, but it only shows how Clouzot was consistently pushing the envelope right till the end. One is only left wondering where Clouzot could have gone after this, a film that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Blow Up or Peeping Tom.
