Anicée Alvina & Sylvia Kristel
‘Playing with Fire’ (Le Jeu avec le feu) is a surreal erotic Arthouse film written and directed by French novelist and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet. It can be considered as a follow-up to his previous film, ‘Successive Slidings of Pleasure‘ (1974), dealing with similar themes and having the same lead actress, Anicée Alvina. Both films deal with Sadomasochist themes with captured women, but this film adds a taboo subplot with an incestuous father-daughter relationship. This film has more of an absurdist comedy tone, whereas ‘Successive Slidings of Pleasure‘ was in pure surrealist mode.
Sylvia Kristel has a small role in ‘Playing with Fire’, shot around the same time with Emmanuelle (1974), before the Dutch actress became the biggest Softcore star in Europe. Aside from Alvina and Kristel, two of the biggest French actors at the time were among the performers: Philippe Noiret and Jean-Louis Trintignant. Beautiful Italian actress, Agostina Belli, also features in a small part. Jean Rollin fans will also recognize Joëlle Coeur here in another small part as one of the kidnapped girls. A young Christine Boisson, after her small part in Emmanuelle (where she masturbates thinking about Paul Newman), has a small part here as well.
Philippe Noiret plays a rich banker who gets a ransom note about his supposedly kidnapped daughter (Anicée Alvina). Trintignant plays the seedy inspector hired by Noiret. Alvina and Krystel find themselves held captive in a strange, kinky brothel where various perversions galore. In this mansion of debauchery torture, rape, necrophilia, bestiality is commonplace. Among the perverts that visit this whorehouse is apparently the banker himself who enjoys inflicting pain on his own daughter by whipping her! This is followed by an incestuous scene where he seduces her. (This reminds one of a brothel scene in the original Twin Peaks series where Ben Horne flirts with Audrey (Sherilyn Fenn) without realizing she is his own daughter.) According to director’s notes, Philippe Noiret was not a big fan of the film and he was quite depressed during the shooting – probably because of the ‘filthy’ acts he had to perform.
Robbe-Grillet’s films are full of fetishist and sadomasochistic images of women tied up, chained, whipped, among other perversions. However, it is always done in a playful style where these provocative images are used less in a titillating effect than as an intellectual exercise. Still, the Arthouse approach he employed wasn’t enough to free himself from accusations of misogyny. Women here are without a doubt objectified, with so much nubile young skin on display, so don’t bother looking for feminist subtexts around. Subversive themes abound in this film, yet it doesn’t take itself seriously and everything is played out in a farcical manner.
This is Anicée Alvina’s film, the camera clearly adores and often lingers on her innocent, yet mischievous face. Sylvia Kristel only appears in a couple of scenes in the second half, but she makes the most of her part and the camera obviously adores her too. She recalls in her memoir: “My first scene in ‘Playing With Fire’ is disturbing and sadomasochistic: my hands are bound, my skirt is torn and I have been whipped. I am reassured only by the kindness and skills of my fellow actors, Trintignant and Noiret.”
Mixing kinky depravity with a playful intellectualism, this sadomasochistic art film will appeal both to cinephiles and vintage erotica fans.
Thanks to Kristel’s presence, this film has been finally made available in English, as part of:
Sylvia Kristel 70’s collection
It was later also released separately by: