On Screen
ASAHINA, ROBERT
On Screen APOCALYPTIC SEX BY ROBERT ASAHINA A American intellectuals have tended to be Francophiles in their cinematic tastes. And they frequently justify this affinity by claiming the French...
...He is narcissistic to the point of fretting over his greying pubic hairs...
...Although this gross self-absorption has already caused his wife to abandon him, he regards that not as a loss, but as an opportunity to indulge in countless one-night stands and to raise his young son in a properly masculine milieu, free from feminist influence...
...Indeed, the women so passively accept the dominance of their masters that the plot developments become quite unbelievable...
...When he is unsuccessful in his efforts to win her back, Philippe??victim of his own hypocrisy??brutally murders her...
...Une Partie de Plaisir returns us to the same idle upper-middle class that has populated so many French films...
...By inviting her infidelity...
...its lifestyle is piously condemned and shamelessly flaunted...
...Valerie sucks Gerard's hand when he cuts himself...
...In The Last Woman, Gerard (Gerard Depardieu) is almost a caricature of the male animal at its crudest...
...The two movies are also predictably preoccupied with the life of the bourgeoisie...
...But they occur in a vacuum and make no moral or dramatic sense...
...and Une Partie de Plaisir (dubiously translated by the American distributor as "A Piece of Pleasure"), directed by Claude Chabrol...
...In Le Boucher and Juste Avant la Nuit, the power of passion to transform characters was the mainspring of the dramatic action...
...Unfortunately, The Last Woman and Un Partie de Plaisir offer only fleeting glimpses of such insight, virtually buried by the ponderous plots and forced climaxes...
...In her recent highly publicized book, Against Our Will, Susan Brown-miller even went so far as to claim that rape-the most extreme and violent expression of male dominance-has historically been the model for all normal male/female relationships...
...The violence of The Last Woman and Une Partie de Plaisir is what we can expect in these circumstances...
...It is the desperate assertion of feeling in the face of an ideology that denies all the emotions that render every one of us??male and female??truly human...
...He casually picks her up and then screws her-there is no better description-but she slowly "raises his consciousness" until he makes the ultimate gesture of sacrifice to her "liberation": He amputates his own erect penis...
...But in the two new films, any such theme is obscured...
...Then, by his questions, he hoped to trivialize it in a desperate attempt to be invulnerable...
...Both Ferreri and Chabrol are capable of dealing with the intricacies of male/female relationships...
...Since they are dramatically unmotivated, they must be prompted by something other than the internal logic of the stories...
...he was seeking to confront what he feared most...
...The Last Woman and Une Partie de Plaisir are also bad films, even for the French cinema...
...And they frequently justify this affinity by claiming the French treat male/female relationships maturely...
...This fundamental incoherence is the true expression of the confusion of the film makers...
...Philippe was trying to do more than merely spread his guilt around...
...In a strikingly parallel scene, Valerie says, "I'm young...
...I suspect, however, that the sexual violence has been inspired by the response of European men to feminism...
...Similarly, the plot requires that following her emancipation, the subservient Esther be independent enough to spurn Philippe and thereby provoke the bloody climax...
...The violent conclusions are, dramatically and psychologically, irrational explosions of impotent male rage, suggesting that, more than anything else, feminism has provoked frustration in France??at least among film makers...
...We can only speculate her new-found strength was magically acquired during the period she is offscreen??she certainly doesn't appear any different when she returns to meet her fate...
...But this concern for the details is really part of his effort to achieve some emotional detachment from what he has wrought...
...For years, in fact, Chabrol has been preoccupied with passion-the common ground between sex and violence...
...The slave of his impulses, he does not so much have erections as they have him...
...The climaxes are the most troubling aspects of the films...
...For whatever the merits of feminism, in its more radical formulations it has tended to regard the sexual dominance of the male as the most significant clue to complex social and psychological problems...
...Only the explosive yet empty endings are moving...
...I mean, rather, the cliches that arc effectively exploited precisely because they are nearly universal modes of behavior...
...Yet such sophistication is scarcely evident in two recent imports: The Last Woman, directed by Marco Ferreri, an Italian film maker working in France...
...Gerard responds by breaking into a trunk she has carefully kept locked to uncover artifacts from her earlier days...
...As Leslie Farber has suggested, since physiology prevents a male from possessing a female constantly, he must feel he possesses her exclusively...
...Gerard's "last woman" is the son's nursery-school teacher, Valerie (Ornella Muti...
...Both movies deal with the debilitating effects of unbridled male sexual supremacy...
...Confident of his dominance...
...In The Last Woman after the woman abandons the man his consciousness is slowly raised, eventually leading him to do violence to himself...
...I do not refer to the obvious, "planted" details that render the men mere cartoon figures...
...Nevertheless, they do provide compelling insights into the peculiarities of the male psyche...
...Esther literally licks Philippe's feet...
...When Philippe interrogates Esther about her sexual involvements, she complains that "men always ask questions...
...Philippe even encourages Esther to be as unfaithful as he has continually been...
...I don't want any memories...
...But the fact that both movies are so totally confused leads me to believe the climaxes arise less from cinematic than psychological concerns...
...It should come as no surprise that males, and not only in France, react strongly to such a reductionist ideology...
...Valerie tells Gerard, "Without an erection, you're nothing,'' yet little else that she says or does makes us believe he could take her seriously enough to attempt proving the indictment wrong by the most extreme measure possible...
...The male characters are obsessed with the past, too...
...The Last Woman focuses on the "new class" of France, which lives in sterile housing developments, works in industry, and shops in gigantic malls...
...As for male artists, there is little left for them to explore about people when relationships are seen as utterly devoid of all the varieties of emotion...
...One can only hope Danielle fares better than Esther...
...The need to fit the past to the present is part of the self-destructive demand for total exclusivity...
...In Une Partie de Plaisir the woman abandons the man after her consciousness has been raised, eventually leading him to do violence to her...
...Carnal Knowledge was a lousy film about male/female relationships, even for Hollywood...
...Its means of support is never made clear...
...One need not be a feminist to be dismayed at their futility...
...I'm still young...
...He is frustrated, discovering nothing worth knowing, and then declares they must "build a whole life together" by recreating a past for themselves...
...The dramatic structures of the two films are somewhat similar...
...Brief accounts cannot adequately capture the fantastically contrived plots and ludicrously mechanical characterizations of these movies...
...And while the movies are stridently anti-male, it would be a mistake to conclude they are therefore profemale...
...Both stories are told from the male's point of view, and Valerie and Esther are willing participants in their own degradation...
...The result of Chabrol's and Ferreri's frustration has been to empty their films of any real emotional content: There is drama without passion and passion without drama...
...I prefer the future," Esther declares...
...The male lead in Une Partie de Plaisir, Philippe (Paul Gegauff, who also wrote the screenplay), is a more cleverly disguised and sophisticated male chauvinist...
...but none of its characters were killed or castrated to make its point...
...He brags to others that he has "taught her good taste.' But at the same time he subtly undermines Esther by embarrassing her in front of their friends, by ridiculing her ideas, middle-class origin and accent, and by slyly demonstrating his superiority in everything from baiting fishing hooks to finishing crossword puzzles...
...Thus, in a few brief scenes both films unerringly expose the peculiarly male tendency to exaggerate the relevance of a woman's past...
...To his surprise and dismay, Esther begins enjoying her new-found freedom, and eventually leaves him...
...It is tempting to interpret Une Partie de Plaisir as a personal psychodrama of Paul and Danielle Gegauff, embodying at least some of the difficulties of their real-life relationship...
...One might be inclined to take a more cynical view of the violence, dismissing it as merely exploitative, milked for its shock value...
...But the future brings only death, Philippe informs her: "The past's all we have...
...If movies are any evidence, it seems the new female liberation has been more troubling to Continental males raised with a heritage of rigid patriarchy and Catholicism than to their American counterparts...
...To some, sleeping around means cheating...
...Let's prove it's not," he says, prescribing infidelity as "preventive medicine" for their relationship...
...He is gently but firmly paternalistic toward Esther (Danielle Gegauff, Paul's wife), who has lived with him for eight years and has borne his daughter...
...For instance, Gerard and Philippe each have a compulsive "need to know...
Vol. 59 • July 1976 • No. 14
