Though obviously intended at the time as naughtily charming, a "chapeau bas" to the wiles of the lusty field-playing Gallic male, this picture has aged terribly. The gifted Jean-Pierre Marielle, who made a career out of playing philandering rascals in such superior pictures as Le Sex Shop and Calmos, here gives us an even earthier incarnation of his trademark cavaleur. In 'Les Galettes,' he's Henri, the rogue, bed-hopping painter fetishistically preoccupied with T&A - on his canvasses and off.
I watched the first third of this picture, and found it chauvinistic but naive and harmless, like the imaginings of a horny adolescent boy. That is, until I reached the sequence where a friend of Henri's essentially rapes a young woman off-camera while she screams at him to stop... Then the female character saunters downstairs post-coitally with a huge smile on her face, and lewd visual indications of her arousal. All to the tune of the friend's assurances that she may have shouted "No, please, DON'T!" but secretly loves getting it. The implications here are the same as those of thousands of stock porno films.
This was one of the most upsetting, offensive, disgusting moments I've ever seen in a movie. I have nothing against sex or nudity in a film but plenty of issues with any movie that only depicts women as mechanical objects of self-gratification. As a rule, I try to judge the politics of a feature by the era in which it was made, but in this case I wanted to bathe after I finished.
I watched the first third of this picture, and found it chauvinistic but naive and harmless, like the imaginings of a horny adolescent boy. That is, until I reached the sequence where a friend of Henri's essentially rapes a young woman off-camera while she screams at him to stop... Then the female character saunters downstairs post-coitally with a huge smile on her face, and lewd visual indications of her arousal. All to the tune of the friend's assurances that she may have shouted "No, please, DON'T!" but secretly loves getting it. The implications here are the same as those of thousands of stock porno films.
This was one of the most upsetting, offensive, disgusting moments I've ever seen in a movie. I have nothing against sex or nudity in a film but plenty of issues with any movie that only depicts women as mechanical objects of self-gratification. As a rule, I try to judge the politics of a feature by the era in which it was made, but in this case I wanted to bathe after I finished.