Successive Slidings of Pleasure [1974]

Anicée Alvina in ‘Successive Slidings of Pleasure’

Glissements progressifs du plaisir (aka ‘Successive Slidings of Pleasure’) is a surreal, avant-garde erotic film by Alain Robbe-Grillet. This film made the nymphet Anicée Alvina famous in France and the film’s success led to Robbe-Grillet’s ‘Playing with Fire’ the following year, reviewed here before, also starring Alvina in the lead. Both films share similar themes of sadomasochism and fetishism. The writer-director Robbe-Grillet was so obsessed with Marquis de Sade‘s themes that he actually shot this film in Chateau de Vincennes, at the infamous writer’s prison cell!

Here is the story: A young woman likes to tie her boyfriend up and make love to him. The woman who shared her apartment (Olga Georges-Picot) is found dead, with a pair of scissors impaled through her heart. She (Alvina) is the principal suspect in the killing, interrogated by the police and the judges, suspected of being a modern witch. Apparently, the girl does have powers, to make all people around her fall prey to her spell, provoking desire and lust. Though it may sound like a mystery-thriller, this is not a plot-driven film, everything is purposefully abstract and irrational.

As we’ve seen in his Playing with Fire, Robbe-Grillet here manages to get away with making an Arthouse film with lots of Exploitation and Erotica elements, similar to Walerian Borowzyck films from the same period, as in Contes immoraux (1973), La Bête (1975) and La Marge (1976). Robbe-Grillet’s films are less explicit and visceral, and more intellectual. He is interested in de Sade’s ideas and concepts of captivity, fetishes and sadism. There are still lots of scenes of women and female mannequins in sadomasochist/bondage poses, being captured, tortured – sleazy scenes of dark dungeons where bad prisoner girls are punished with whips, chains, and a little lesbianism, all of which would have made de Sade proud!

‘Captive Beauty’ is the main Sadean theme here. In Sade’s writings, Sadomasochism existed to defy the society, as a way of embracing ‘Nature’. For de Sade, Nature is cruel, and therefore we must be cruel as well. Everything forced on us by Society and Religion should be defied because they are unnatural, against our natures. Anicee Alvina’s heroine here is not a passive character, but a defiant female figure. She succeeds in casting a spell over every authority figure in the film, including both the police and religious authorities. She is a Force of Nature that cannot be contained by society. She may be a prisoner, but like in many other stories of captured beauties, she is an object of Adoration at the same time.

A few final words on the French beauties here. Anicée Alvina is perfectly cast: she has the right mix of innocent and mischievous. This half French, half Persian beauty was so young that she had to act in this film under the supervision of her parents, considering all the nudity and the perverse themes. But she was already doing nude scenes when she was 17 in the 1970 UK film Friends. But her sexiest role might be in The Beguines (1972) where she plays a teenager who is seduced by her father’s much older mistress (Nicole Courcel). The other star of Glissements…, Olga Georges-Picot (2 different roles actually, in line with the film’s sureeal bent) also owed her exceptional beauty to a nice mixture: she is half French, half Russian. Her breakthrough role was in 1968 when she had a lead role in Alain Resnais’ Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime. 1973 sex comedy Les confidences érotiques d’un lit trop accueillant is very generous in showing Olga’s gorgeous body. (The great Isabelle Huppert, only 20 at the time, appears in a small part as well.)

This film is recommended to fans of Arthouse Erotica, readers of Marquis de Sade and to people who enjoy intellectual, symbolic, surreal filmmaking and exploration of fetishism and erotic themes.

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