Successive Slidings of Pleasure

Before the opening credits were over, I could tell that this was going to be an impenetrable piece of pretentious arthouse garbage. I don't usually like to use the word pretentious - it's a lazy epithet - but in this case, it has never been more apt: the whole film is up itself.

I watched it on the mistaken belief that it was a horror film; it's not. Exactly what it is is anyone's guess - the surreal story is so abstract and the treatment so avant-garde that it's hard to work out what director Alain Robbe-Grillet's intention was.

If the film wasn't French and from the '70s, I would have guessed that the whole thing was a parody of French '70s arthouse cinema, but it isn't: this is the real deal. Perhaps if the film was condensed to twenty minutes of the weirdest moments (whilst retaining the gratuitous nudity, of course), I wouldn't hate it quite as much as I do, but at a whopping 105 minutes, it is an excruciatingly, dull watch.

Due to a technical hitch, I had to view the last twenty minutes or so without subtitles, but it didn't make a whole lot of difference: I had long given up trying to make sense of it all.

1/10. One of the worst films I have ever seen.

The French film Glissements progressifs du plaisir (1974) was shown in the U. S. with the translated title Successive Slidings of Pleasure. It was written and directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet.

The movie stars Anicée Alvina as Alice, who may or may not have killed another woman by stabbing her with a pair of scissors. Alice is locked up in a strange institution that is part convent, part prison, and part dungeon.

Anicée Alvina is very beautiful, and when director Robbe-Grillet tires of showing us her high cheekbones, he shows us her nude body. When he tires of that, he returns to the cheekbones. There's plenty of nudity from other beautiful women as well.

OK--it's a movie with continual nudity. However, it slides into necrophilia, and that's really, really creepy. Truth in reviewing--I stopped watching the movie at that point, so I don't know how it ends.

This film has a feeble IMDb rating of 6.2. However, I want to warn potential viewers to find another film. Because of that wish, I rated it 1.

A young woman is interviewed by police, judges and clergy who may not all be real over possibly murdering her flatmate. She makes art on naked bodies and mannequins and is probably a prostitute but also might be a witch. That's almost all the plot there is, all you'll get from me at any rate but suffice to say, those looking for conventional narrative and clear cut explanations will not have a good time here. This here is more of a delving into the mysteries of mind and memory, an exploration of fractured mind framed in the trappings of Euro-sploitation, its time-line treading forwards, backwards and even sideways from its central bloody death, the effect being that past, present and future become as one, the film itself becomes an image of mind trapped in misgiving and illusion. Its tricksy stuff and can be daunting but the key is in the source, writer/director Alain Robbe-Grillet is generally best known for writing Last Year In Marienbad and while Successive Slidings of Pleasure may be less profound than that marvel of philosophical mystery it shares in its concerns and structure of film as headstate rather than means of surveying from outside. It is also marginally more penetrable than the earlier film, with its various flashbacks and repeated images acting as useful clues to orient the audience in the journey. Not that its symbolism or connections are all that easy to piece together, but they serve as a whole to create a relatively cohesive if slippery mind image at the close of play, a print on the brain that doesn't necessarily require many viewings to interpret and report upon. The major difference from Last Year In Marienbad though is the sleaze. Sure, there aren't any Franco style cooch zooms, but the leading lady (stunning Anicee Alvina) is always seductive and often nude, even painting her body to print red upon the floor or smear herself across white walls. She paints the body of her flatmate (Olga Georges-Picot, also stunning) too and together they get up to some winningly strange behaviour including a breathtaking scene involving eggs and a truly bizarre bit of doll mutilation. The bloodier bits are eyebrow raising as well, sensual but never gratuitous. At times things get a little too pretentious, with one scene towards the end a real groaner (coming across as the work of an imbecile parody of the avant garde) and the film as a whole a tad overlong, but mostly this is really splendid stuff. Speech delivered straight to camera, formal body language, terrific sound design with mismatched soundtrack sometimes illustrating thought and other times just letting scenes bleed into each other, its a great trip for sense and mind. Probably something of a niche audience film, but if you fall into that spot on the Venn diagram where philosophers and kooky sleaze-hounds converge, this is a must see. 8/10.

SPOLILERS...kind of.

There is so much going on in this movie it's hard to know where to start. The key is a line where the girl's lawyer says, "All who approach you are perverts, insane. But it's all in your little mind." Looked at in that context, the "plot" means nothing since it's more about thoughts than action.

That said, the central character, called only "The Prisoner" is arrested for the murder of her lover, Nora. The two are in a Domme/sub, BDSM relationship with The Prisoner portrayed as the Dominant.

Many characters take on double meanings. The police, it seems to me, represent the author, asking supposedly meaningless questions that would only make sense if you were creating a rich background life for a character such as The Prisoner. One of the cops, rather than documenting the crime, blatantly records the themes of the movie: "Themes of broken bottles". Bottles stand in for the wombs and this refers the broken mother/daughter relationship between...

...The Prisoner and Nora. Nora is her mother. The same cop that records themes rather than evidence, has a scene where he recites words while writing and researching something (probably the screenplay being filmed) in the bed Nora was killed in. This is crosscut with The Prisoner being show objects and free associating. The cop says "parricide". The Prisoner says "disassociation".

Throughout the movie, Nora seems the submissive except for one scene - when the Prisoner sells herself to a man looking for deviant sex. She takes them up to the room. Nora lounges in a window seat. Stepping back, the actual "plot" revolves around Mother Nora selling and sexually abusing her daughter.

Her court-appointed lawyer (read "protector") is played by the same actress that plays Nora. At first, Nora acts like the mother The Prisoner wants/needs - strict and no-nonsense. But, The Prisoner's insanity seduces Lawyer/Mom/Nora, or at least that's the scenario The Prisoner dreams up. The Prisoner ends up killing Lawyer/Mom/Nora in very similar circumstances.

Plot-wise, the police find that Nora was NOT killed by the prisoner. They come to tell The Prisoner this and find The Lawyer dead. "We'll have to start over", the cop says.

What the director presents to us is a portrait of The Prisoner, deep in the clutches of her disassociation, creating a world that's easier for her to live in - where she controls her mother, dressing her as a manikin and, just by thinking about it, causes people to die. It's complex, gorgeous and, if not actual porn, has enough nudity to satisfy that requirement if that's what you're looking for.

A young woman is interrogated by the police and the judges,suspected of being a modern witch.The girl who shared her apartment has been found dead with a pair of scissors impaled through her heart,as she lay attached to the bedposts.Apparently,the girl does have powers,to make all people around her fall prey to her spell,glissing progressively into desire,lust and the unknown.Alain Robbe-Grillet has to be one of the most innovative French novelists and film-makers.His "Successive Slidings of Pleasure" is a wonderful film that contains plenty of surreal moments and lots of sleaze.The movie itself is truly unique and bizarre,so fans of unusual European art-house exploitation won't be disappointed.So if you are a fan of Jean Rollin's works give this one a look.This is my first journey into Alain Robbe-Grillet's visions and I'm highly impressed!