When photographer Servais (Fabio Testi) makes photos from a porn shoot, he
gets fascinated by its lead actress Nadine (Romy Schneider), so he decides to
visit her the next day at her appartment, & even the fact that her husband
Jacques (Jacques Dutronc) is also present doesn't discourage him from trying to
get a date with her ... to which she even agrees. But when they meet & she
offers him nothing more than some quick sex, he leaves prematurely (keeping his
pants on). Instead he decides to do something for her so she can be grateful
to him & grow to love him (not realizing that he tries to buy her love): he
hooks up with actor Zimmer(Klaus Kinski) & director Massala (Guy Mairesse)
& agrees to finance their theatrical production of Richard III if
they give Nadine - a wannabe theatre actress who's doing porn only for the
money - the female lead, but do not tell her of Servais' involvement ... &
happily they agree. The play though bombs witht he critics & is cancelled
prematurely, but by now Nadine has grown wise to Servais, & to thank him
for his money (which he had to earn shooting porn for racketeer Mazelli [Claude
Dauphin]) she once again offers him her body, & once again he refuses,
reylizing his attempt to bua her love has failed. Nadine's husband Jacques
however has by now grown wise to Servais' attempts to make Nadine love him too,
& in a weird plottwist asks him to look after his wife a little, & for
that Servais gives him the money he got from Zimmer - a rich man pretending to
be a poor actor - as recompensation for the losses of the play. In an even
weirder plottwist, Jacques is driven to suicide by this, & at his dead
body, Nadine & Servais split up for good (or so they think). But Servais
still owes racketeer Mazelli some money (quite some actually), & when
Mazelli comes to collect, he has his boys beat Servais up bad (even though
Servais pays the money back without showing any restistance). Then, Nadine, who
has just split up with him, shows up at Servais' appartment, &, seeing his
batztered face, confessees her love for him. Director Zulawski was
always one who liked to provoke, so he chose to place this picture (at least in
parts) in the seedy underworld of porn. However, Zulawski's ideas of
provocation seem to be to put name stars (of its day) into sexploitation
surroundings & fill it up with eccentric characters, pseudo-intellectual
dialogues (emphasis on pseudo), & the ever-present transvestites & gays
- whioch in itself is of course not a bad thing, but when you peel away this
surface, a pretty dull melodram comes to the fore that suffers severely from
its non-sensical plottwists, its clichéd characterisations & its lack of
character-motivations. & what's also evident is the lack of real passion
that Zulawski has for his film's subject matter - a passion that's so evident
in the works of real sexploitation filmmakers like Jess Franco or Russ Meyer -,
instead just using it as a different kind of glossy surface.
|