La Prisonnière (1968)
Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot

Film Review

Henri-Georges Clouzot is justly celebrated as one of the masters of French cinema, but his reputation rests on a handful of films - Le Corbeau (1943), Le Salaire de la peur (1955) and Les Diaboliques (1955) - whilst much of his work is underrated, misunderstood or else all but forgotten.  It's hard to account for the comparative obscurity of his final film, La Prisonnière, Clouzot's one and only colour film, made in that tumultuous spring of 1968.  An honest and fascinating study in the perversity of desire, it is arguably Clouzot's most profound work, and, thanks to Andréas Winding's mesmerisingly beautiful cinematography, his most visually alluring.

With its portrayal of a bourgeois young woman seeking escape from an unfulfilled marriage by living out her sadomasochistic fantasies, La Prisonnière vaguely resembles Luis Buñuel's Belle de jour (1967), but, lacking Buñuel's dark humour and surreal flights of fancy, Clouzot's film takes on a somewhat more disturbing aspect.  "Tout le monde est voyeur", one character observes early on in the film, and, perhaps inspired by Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960),  Clouzot proves the truth of this by making us all voyeurs as we watch with macabre fascination as Elisabeth Wiener and Laurent Terzief embark on a strange game of domination and submission.

Contrary to our expectations, it is not the game that makes the two main protagonists - art dealer Stan and his mistress Josée - prisoners, but the invisible chains of their petit-bourgeois existence.  Josée is trapped in a sterile marriage and is clearly on the look out for some extra-marital excitement.  Stan is a control freak who, incapable of having 'normal' relationships with women, can only be gratified by photographing them in degrading poses.  Her interest aroused by a strategically placed film slide, Josée willingly makes herself Stan's prisoner, but what starts out as the classic master-slave relationship soon develops into a genuine, mutually felt romantic attachment.  A shared taste for the decidely kinky proves to be the mechanism by which Josée and Stan are liberated from their state of emotional incarceration.  Submission equals deliverance, for both of them.

Throughout the film, Clouzot takes an obvious delight in cocking a snook at bourgeois respectability.  For him, this is no more than a trompe-l'oeil, as devious and flagrantly superficial as the eye-catching but meretricious exhibits in Stan's modern art gallery.  Everyone is a voyeur, everyone is prone to sordid fantasies, but middleclass propriety does its damnedest to persuade us this is not so.  The grotesque act of sex is sanctified by the holy state of matrimony and our voyeuristic yearnings are safely contained, even legitimised, by cinema and television.  The one unifying theme to Clouzot's oeuvre is a burning contempt for bourgeois hypocrisy, and in his opus ultimum he goes as far as the censor and good taste will permit him in his attempt to exorcise the sham that prevents us from seeing who we really are.

What is perhaps most remarkable about La Prisonnière is that it disturbs without shocking.  There are a few scenes where Clouzot flirts openly with eroticism - the most salacious being the one in which Dany Carrel strips and poses suggestively in a see-through plastic mac for snaphappy Terzief - but what he shows is tame, even for the standards of the era in which the film was made.  It is what Clouzot implies, rather than what he puts on the screen, that disturbs us - namely, that by taking pleasure in watching the film we are as warped as the protagonists within it.

The film's opening sequence shows a bespectacled weirdo (later revealed to be Stan) toying with several dolls, deriving obvious pleasure as he fondles and animates them with his fingers.  Knowing something of Clouzot's tendency to dominate and control his actors, effectively treating them as passive playthings, we can readily identify him with Stan.  By implication, Josée represents the film's spectator, the lip-licking voyeur willing to lap up whatever sordid fantasy the director has in store for her.  Well before we get to the end of La Prisonnière, we realise that it is intended as a mirror, in which Clouzot shows us our true nature.

If La Prisonnière does contain a shock, it comes right at the end - the grand finale, not just to the film but also to Clouzot's entire filmmaking career.  Those familiar with this director's better known work will already be aware that he has a habit of signing  off with a bang (literally in the case of Le Salaire de la peur), but what he reserves for his final film is way beyond anything we might have expected.  What we get is a cinematic spectacle that is every bit as dynamic and startling as the famous Stargate trip in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which (coincidentally?) had its first screening just as Clouzot was shooting his film.

A quick-fire montage of weirdly psychedelic images burst from the screen, drawing us deeper into Josée's subconscious mind as it pulls back from the brink of death.  Hundreds of shots are blasted onto our retinas in a matter of minutes, making up a fragmented collage of memories and bizarre fantasies which is all the more spectacular for the use of coloured filters and rotating lights.  The sounds we hear are just as disconcerting, an eerie mélange of of Mahler and Musique Concrète.  It's similar to the ending that Clouzot had planned for his previous film L'Enfer (1964), which he had been forced to abandon for health reasons.  The test shots that Clouzot had taken for this earlier film (the centrepiece of Serge Bromberg's 2009 documentary L'Enfer d'Henri-Georges Clouzot) are strikingly similar to what he managed to include in his explosive finale to La Prisonnière - a dazzling visual fantasia giving the starkest representation of a mind fractured by desire and neurosis.  What better way to end an illustrious film career than with a total surrender to artistic freedom?

Film Synopsis

Stanislas Hessler is an art dealer and owner of a modern art gallery in Paris which is presently promoting the work of up-and-coming artist Gilbert Moreau. One evening, whilst Gilbert, is busy entertaining a female art critic, his wife Josée accompanies Stan back to his rooftop apartment.  Josée is surprised to learn that one of Stan's hobbies is taking photographs of naked women in humiliating positions.  Intrigued, she attends one of Stan's photographic sessions and before she knows it she becomes one of his models.  Josée soon realises she is deeply in love with Stan, not knowing that his fetish derives from a deep-seated emotional repression.  With her husband away in Düsseldorf, Josée accompanies Stan to Brittany for a romantic break, oblivious to the traumas that lie ahead...