Drink Blood, or What Kind of Dumb Jerk Are You?

Kino Lorber and Raro Video keep pumping out DVDs and Blu-rays of the strange and the obscure.  Tuesday sees the release of four more, including two in Kino's ongoing re-issues of the films of Alain Robbe-Grillet. And so onward!

 

Blue Movie (d. Alberto Cavallone) - Speaking of ongoing re-issue projects, Raro Video continues to indulge their taste in Italian oddities, including this piece of fractured political, ahm, well I'll just say it, nonsense.  It's about a woman (Dirce Funari) who, after escaping from a gang of rapists, and possibly killing one of them, ends up in the home of a pretty much entirely hateful artist (Claude Maran), who collects empty soda cans and treats all the women who drift within his orbit like garbage.  In fairness, we're not meant to approve of this man, but it would be nice to find him somewhat interesting, or any of the things that happen inside his home compelling in some way.  But what you should probably understand about Blue Movie before heading in, is that it's the sort of movie that features an extended blowjob scene scored in part to Offenbach's "The Infernal Gallop," that universally recognized piece of can-can music (which, by the way, would seem to imply that at least the on-screen action at this moment had some energy to it, but no; a sleepier blowjob you'll not find), and then afterwards the guy slaps the woman and calls her stupid.  As far as "interesting things" go in Blue Movie, this will have to do.

Blue Movie came out in 1978, four years after Dusan Makavejev's Sweet Movie and three years after Pasolini's Salo, 120 Days of Sodom, the statement of which fact should indicate to wily readers that all three have something in common.  I'll maybe leave that for you to figure out in any case, but the thing worth pointing out here (okay, I'm talking about shit, as part of one of Claudio's art projects a woman smears shit all over herself in this movie) is that the shit scene is juxtaposed with real (though distorted by Cavallone) footage of a Buddhist monk self-immolating.  The shit, I'm willing to bet, was fake, which is perhaps neither here nor there, or even a source of relief, but nevertheless ends up highlighting how much of a pose Cavallone's imagery is, and if that monk knew anything about this sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-Godard "attack" on (I'm pretty sure) consumerism, boy I bet he'd probably be pretty embarrassed.

I have to say, though, that at the end Blue Movie takes a turn of a sort that would ordinarily drive me crazy but in this case actually up-ended things in a way that I thought worked rather well.  Cavallone can't quite let well enough alone and so casts this development (which has to do with the exact relationship between Silvia and Claudio, plus more) into some slight doubt, but the positive damage had already been done, and Blue Movie does become, very briefly, kind of worthwhile.  But worthwhile only if you've been obligated to sit through the thing up to that point.

Gang War in Milan (d. Umberto Lenzi) - Much more my speed is this 1973 crime picture from Umberto Lenzi, a filmmaker best known for his cannibal films Cannibal Ferox and Eaten Alive!  I haven't seen either of those, nor, I suspect, will I ever, but Gang War in Milan, at least, I'm grateful for.  It's a great, mean little piece of amorality starring Antonio Sabato as Salvatore Cangemi, a successful and powerful Milan crime boss.  As the film opens, Cangemi learns that someone wants to either start a war with him or force a partnership -- this someone turns out to be a dapper (reserved to offset Cangemi's passion) Frenchman played by Phillipe Leroy.  Cangemi makes his money by dominating the prostitution business, and the Frenchman wants to establish a heroin trade, and so anyway things go badly between the two sides.

The key to Gang War in Milan's success is that Lenzi never falls into that pandering trap of making Cangemi, the film's lead, heroic, or the "nice" crime boss.  He's as much of a scumbag as anyone else, abusing the hookers, plotting murders, actually carrying out murders, and being as morally ignorant (this suddenly strikes me as a key idea, not just here but in a lot of similar films, and also in, you know, life) as you'd expect someone like this to be.  What Lenzi has to guide us through this mess is not some manufactured rooting interest but rather pure propulsion, and a reliance on the knowledge that human beings eat this stuff up, when it's done well.  Plus, hero or not, Sabato is pretty terrific in his blind, cartoonish bluster, as a man who can never quite accept that it's actually possible for his empire to crumble, that nothing is guaranteed, and if no one loves you then it's probably true that when the chips are down no one's really going to help you, either.

Eden and After (d. Alain Robbe-Grillet) - Somewhat more difficult to get a handle on than the previous two films, though this is to be expected, is Eden and After, Alain Robbe-Grillet's 1970 film about a group of decadent French students who routinely gather in a café called Eden and play games that simulate violence and rape, all as empty as Claudio's soda cans in Blue Movie.  The difference being that while these students can't see that, Robbe-Grillet can, and so he introduces into their midst Duchemin (Pierre Zimmer), a sinister man with a supply of a drug he's brought over from African tribesmen, which he calls "fear powder," and which, indeed, within the mind of our protagonist Violette (Catherine Jourdan), a kind of terror does take hold.

Plus there's lots more.  I sometimes worry that I have a tendency to compare a film I've just watched, or book I've just read, to another film or book I'd enjoyed not long before -- the concern here being similar to not being able to see past one's own nose.  With that out of the way, thinking about Paul Bowles, whose great last novel Up Above the World I seriously just read, is kind of unavoidable when the whole mess of characters, having divided into factions and now driven by strange motives, pick up and head to Tunisia. Bowles made his home in Morocco, and Up Above the World isn't even set in Africa, but even so the hallucinatory sex and violence into which these fools eventually spiral is quite Bowlesian.  As imagined by Robbe-Grillet, of course, and indeed a more immediate comparison would be to Robbe-Grillet's own Successive Slidings of Pleasure for the structure (kind of), and L'Immortelle for the doom of it all.

It's difficult, or anyway I find it to be so, and also you may have already noticed this anyhow, to sum up not just what Eden and After is, but what I think of it, besides "It is good."  If I had to boil it down, I'd say it's a film about people who pursue nothing until death.  I'm okay with that, actually -- there's a good deal more, obviously, but still, that's a lot of it.

The Man Who Lies (d. Alain Robbe-Grillet) - Robbe-Grillet's third film was this sort of cock-eyed mix between a French Occupation thriller and the Martin Guerre story.  Among the many, many things that make this thing cock-eyed are the fact that it takes place many years after World War II, and therefore the Occupation, ended, and also in this particular situation instead of Martin Guerre it would be his friend, and his friend could only be considered a villain, not the hero Guerre would have wanted him to be. If they even knew each other in the first place.

This "friend," Boris, is played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, who it somehow just now occurs to me resembled in his youth a cross between Frank Sinatra and John Cassavetes.  In this film, Sinatra from Von Ryan's Express specifically, but why? Other than an extremely tenuous World War II connection, the two films couldn't be more different, and Sinatra's heroic Col. Ryan would have been thoroughly disgusted by the venal, cowardly, awful Boris Varissa.  But I thought of Mark Robson's rousing adventure all the same, possibly because, as is usually the case with Robbe-Grillet, the movie-ness of everything is not intended to go unnoticed by the audience.  There's a part late in the movie, when Boris is telling another of his  many different stories about the fate of Jean Robin, the disappeared Resistance hero of the small village Boris has fled to (though we see them, from whom, exactly?) at the beginning of the film, and we're shown the story Boris is telling.  A woman is seen conspiring with German soldiers to give up the whereabouts of Boris and Jean, and the actors exaggerate their behavior almost to the point of pantomime.  That's because this is a lie, we know it's a lie, it's possible Boris doesn't care if anyone believes him as long as he can stall them, and anyway as far as these lies at 24 frames per second go, we're all in this together.

Jean-Louis Trintignant is utterly superb in this, by the way, in a way that might have brought the whole John Cassavetes side of him to the forefront.  It's a comic performance at times, the kind of comedy that comes from watching a bastard be a bastard to everyone, and the comedy of a con man spreading horseshit.  It's a very naturalistic performance, actually, which Trintignant has plopped down in the middle of Robbe-Grillet's madness.  I haven't mentioned the three women -- Robin's widow, his sister, and their servant -- who Boris seduces and lives with for a time, or the completely, wonderfully bonkers and dialogue-free sequence showing these women -- who incidentally when Boris isn't around comprise a sort of Gothic lesbian coven -- moving, or as the case might be not moving, depending on circumstance, and posing like...they're models in a photo shoot, I want to say, except that's not quite it.  In any case, it's all scored to Michel Fano's almost literally industrial (it's not the drums so much as the creaking doors and sometimes I think he's throwing things on the floor) score.  What's this scene doing here?  I don't know, but run it again.

You Never Think About Your Life

I watched some movies recently. Are they on video right now? Yes. All of them? Well no. But soon! Here, let me explain...

The Great Beauty (d. Paolo Sorrentino) - Last Tuesday, Criterion released Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty, just a couple weeks after it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language film. So clearly everything's coming up Sorrentino lately, just a couple of years after his previous feature, This Must Be the Place, starring Sean Penn as an aging glam rock 'n roll star turned Nazi hunter (for some strange reason, I haven't seen this yet) was met with some unhappy bafflement. And in truth The Great Beauty hasn't been greeted with only applause -- from what I've seen, it's a somewhat divisive films, and some of the unconvinced can be rather venomous. Why's that, I wonder.

The film stars Toni Servillo (absolutely sensational) as Jep Gambardella, a middle-aged writer whose one novel was published decades ago. It's been mostly forgotten, and he looks back on this young man's work with what Dennis Potter once called "tender contempt." Now Jep spends his time writing culture reviews and articles and living it up at night, his apartment, which overlooks the Coliseum, being one of what I must assume are many, many hubs of big-spending nightlife. But Jep's empty. He has a good time, but his mind is never far from a distant memory of Elisa (Anna Luisa Capasa), a girl he loved in his youth but hasn't seen in many years, and who, he learns from Elisa's husband, recently died, never having forgotten Jep.

All of which makes The Great Beauty sound like a rather tender story about aging and regret, which to some degree it is, but Sorrentino's film is also a colorful, grotesque, whirlwind attack on contemporary Italian obscenity, excess, and blindness. Though not precisely evil, things can get somewhat infernal back at Jep's place (a shot of a regular party guest realizing in horror that she's overdosing on cocaine is almost thrown away), and if Jep's fiddling while this all happens is self-aware, that doesn't excuse him. Sorrentino sets up his intentions rather ingeniously in the beginning, with a series of images depicting tourists as well as oblivious locals lounging against and clashing with the relics of the ancient world that are now scattered throughout Rome like trees or park benches. This modernity set against the ancient -- and Jep, possibly alone among his friends, does notice the past -- brings to mind Rossellini's Journey to Italy, which had George Sanders rushing away from his wife Ingrid Bergman so that he could enjoy Italy's nightlife while she wandered further into its past. Also evoke are Fellini, in various guises, and Antonioni, whose work in particular Sorrentino seems interested in trying to draw towards some kind of logical conclusion, and even Resnais, in Sorrentino's meaningless and almost frightening lost and wealthy characters, sprawled across the lawn.

The Great Beauty starts to have a tough time at about the ninety minute mark, around the time a particularly significant story development sends Jep reeling. Sorrentino appears to share Jep's struggle to right himself, and the film hit several points that feel like logical endings before skipping off in a new direction. And while The Great Beauty hardly resembles a film that was written with a screenwriting guide within easy reach (this is a good thing), it's hard not to imagine that Sorrentino doesn't now understand the pitfalls of introducing a vital character (I'm thinking of the 104-year-old nun, here) three-quarters of the way through your film. Be all that as it may, The Great Beauty nevertheless remains a sort of glorious act of flag-planting: Sorrentino has wrapped up the major landmarks of Italian cinema into one bemused, disgusted, sad, and hopeful package. The stain that is the prime ministership of Silvio Berlusconi has often been noted when discussing this film, and while that would logically be Sorrentino's inspiration, The Great Beauty is a greater and more sympathetic biopic than that man could ever hope to deserve.

L'Immortelle (d. Alain Robbe-Grillet) - Speaking of Alain Resnais, sort of, on Tuesday Kino Lorber's Redemption line will continue its Alain Robbe-Grillet revival with their release of writer/director Robbe-Grillet's 1963 debut L'Immortelle. Robbe-Grillet had written Resnais' Last Year in Marienbad a couple of years previously. That experience appears to have stuck with Robbe-Grillet, let's say, because frequently resembles that earlier film, prominently using, for example, the imagery of people standing completely still and spread over a confined landscape like chess pieces. It's been some time since I saw Last Year in Marienbad, but here the ultimate effect of this effect is one of almost horror-film unease. This partially despite, and partially because, of the fact that L'Immortelle is very consciously a crime thriller, or "crime thriller." Despite their clear relationship to one genre or another, I've found it almost impossible to comfortably categorize the Robbe-Grillet films I've seen so far, and it's no less difficult here, even though it's nowhere near as aggressively post-modern as Trans-Europ-Express, which I wrote bout earlier this year. In the case of L'Immortelle, Robbe-Grillet's story is a simple one. Jacques Doniol-Valcroze plays a man traveling through Turkey. He stops for directions and finds himself in the company of a mysterious woman played by Francoise Brion, with whom he naturally falls in love. There's much he doesn't understand about her, but she's game and alluring and then one day he can't find her. She doesn't answer his calls, she doesn't call him, or leave a message with his somnambulant landlady, nothing. Obsessed, he begins searching for her, and L'Immortelle begins to take on the air of the kind of thriller that might have been written by Patricia Highsmith, or if you were too high-falutin' to call it a thriller, maybe by Paul Bowles.

Doniol-Valcroze's quest, and the form it takes, is classic thriller material, but of course Robbe-Grillet's concept of where this should all end is all his own. Scenes repeat, but with different characters. A child seems to appear in two places at once (and the man witnessing this seems not the least bit alarmed by it). The barking of a Satanic gangster's two dogs can be heard at any time. An antiques dealer from whom Doniol-Valcroze purchased a strange and supposedly rare figurine assures him that the exact piece that has reappeared in his window cannot be the same one. And in fact I'm eschewing one bit of plot that occurs about halfway through and completely blows L'Immortelle up. And which by the end means exactly what?

As I've said, the overall atmosphere of this film is one of horror, not unlike, actually, certain stories by Robert Aickman or Reggie Oliver, or any other classically-minded writer who sends an unwitting tourist into a world he or she can't hope to understand. Not that Turkey itself is the source of horror, but Doniol-Valcroze's character isn't depicted as wholly ignorant of the language just because. He's an easy mark for whatever it is that gets his, or their, or its, hooks into him.

A Touch of Sin (d. Jia Zhangke) - Another major 2013 film, this anthology of violent stories about China will also be arriving on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber, on April 8. Jia Zhangke loosely adapts several true events to tell the story of an angry miner (Wu Jiang) who suffers physical and mental abuse as a result of corruption in his village before finally snapping and going on a murder spree; a brutally violent thief (Baoqiang Wang); a receptionist at a sauna (Tao Zhao) who kills a man threatening her with rape; and a young man (Lanshan Luo) who is driven by financial and romantic desperation to commit suicide.

Money is at the heart of each of these stories, and the belief of the corrupt in that the ability to spend entitles them to everything they want. Now what other 2013 film does that remind you of? It's not just that, either -- coincidentally, and in pursuit of a slightly different goal, the final shot of A Touch of Sin mirrors the final shot of Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street. But maybe not even slightly different. The final scene of The Wolf of Wall Street is set in New Zealand, which suddenly turns the target of the last shot, and the whole film, into a global one, while A Touch of Sin is a local story, top to bottom. Nevertheless, both final shots could perhaps be titles "Look At Yourselves," which is always a fair question.

A Touch of Sin is not otherwise particularly Scorsese-esque, though it, like many Scorsese films, is quite violent. This being my first Jia Zhangke film, I don't know if he's ever dealt with such extreme violence on screen before, but it does often seem like it's something he's not used to, and is constantly grappling with find new ways to make it both fresh and visceral. When the miner begins blowing people away with his shotgun, it's a shock, however easily this turn is predicted, but as Jia explores new angles from which to film it, or new tracks along which to follow the movement of bodies, it's hard to not think something more blunt and less glossily splattered might have not made his point better. If such a suspicion occurs to you, a moment later on, when Baoqiang Wang's thief approaches a man and woman outside of a bank and abruptly shoots the woman in the head, might confirm that you were correct. It's a horrible moment, not polished, seemingly not choreographed (though of course it was). One uncomfortable possibility in the change in styles is that the people the miner kills (with one exception) "have it coming" -- see also the killing of the potential rapist by Tao Zhao's receptionist. I'm not about to wring my hands over a killing done in completely justified self defense, but it's filmed in a way that is meant to remind the viewer of a martial arts or samurai film. Mind you, Jia doesn't completely flip his lid here, but the associations are unmistakable, and the design of the moment strikes me as not an entirely good idea. There are as many ways to film violence as there are to film a dream sequence, but I think filmmakers today too rarely appreciate the power of bluntness, and perhaps don't realize how even the slightest stylization can rob the moment of its slap. In A Touch of Sin, I don't think Jia Zhangke lands as many slaps as he intended.

They Won't Guillotine a Little Girl

One thing I thought about while watching Trans-Europ-Express and Successive Slidings of Pleasure, the two films by Alain Robbe-Grillet that were released on Blu-ray last week by Kino Lorber's Redemption Films, and about Trans-Europ-Express in particular, was "I should really probably give Breathless another shot."

Now hold on there!  I've spoken before about my, let's call it "ambivalence," towards Jean-Luc Godard, but lately if you say something even the slightest bit cockeyed about him then you should probably gear up for a rain of shit, virtually speaking, so come on, don't do that to me.  Regarding Breathless, Godard's seminal New Wave crime film from 1960, to those who've wondered why I, crime fiction and film fan that I am, didn't love at least that one, I've always said that my interests in that genre don't generally include "crime fiction, once removed," this being how I've always thought of the post-modern nature of that particular film.

"Well, fair enough," you're almost certainly not saying, "but where does that leave Robbe-Grillet's Trans-Europ-Express, which I'm told you rather liked?"  Well, indeed.  Robbe-Grillet's film is from 1967, and it is, if anything, more playfully aware of itself than Breathless.  In the film, Robbe-Grillet plays a filmmaker who, while on a trip with members of his production team on the titular locomotive, starts to hash out a film plot about a drug smuggler moving cocaine to Antwerp.  The first little run-through they do on this story is dramatized -- by Robbe-Grillet the actual filmmaker who made Trans-Europ-Express -- by a short slapstick scene of cops and gangsters wearing the most ridiculous fake beards imaginable.  As the director, the character in Trans-Europ-Express, backtracks over certain ideas, as he will do throughout the film, the drug smuggling protagonist is given a name, Elias, and is even cast.  Jean-Louis Trintignant turns up on the train, and the director goes, more or less, "Hey, it's Jean-Louis Trintignant, he'd be great."  Of course they don't approach him, but as the crime plot is further tweaked and re-worked, it is now Trintignant in the role (and it was probably him in the beard anyway).

And, kind of, so on.  It's that sort of movie, a film not just about making movies but, possibly more than anything, a film about telling stories, or, perhaps even more than that, a film about plotting, stories.  I found this interesting, partly because I detected no disdain on Robbe-Grillet's part towards this most sneered-at of narrative technical problems, and in fact I got the sense this was something Robbe-Grillet rather enjoyed doing, and enjoyed in the movie's of others.  At the same time, the art of plotting comes off in Trans-Europ-Express as an almost entirely arbitrary one.  Robbe-Grillet's character answers every question about the plot posed by his creative team with "I don't know," or some version of it.  It's the big joke of the film, and if it's not really fair, or anyway certainly can't be applied generally, not even within the crime genre, that doesn't mean it's not funny.

There's rather a bit more, however, though before getting there it might behoove me to first bring 1974's Successive Slidings of Pleasure into the mix.  Also soaked in Robbe-Grillet's favored genres -- crime again, to a degree, as well as horror an various kinds of exploitation -- this one stars the maddeningly gorgeous Anicee Alvina as a young woman who, after a frenzied opening credits sequence that, among other things, shows us images that will appear in context later in the film, we learn has been imprisoned in a convent on suspicion of murdering her roommate and lover Nora (Olga Georges-Picot).  From there, and even before, Successive Slidings of Pleasure becomes a disturbing, bewildering, bloodily manic piece of genre abstraction, constantly eerie and gorgeous to look at that may never make complete sense, often flat-out lies to us -- a section late in the film showing a series of lesbian encounters between the nuns and female prisoners is the product of the young woman telling a disturbed priest "what he wanted to hear."  So is any of it true?  If not, you might well ask, what is the purpose of putting so much of it in the movie?  "Because Robbe-Grillet wanted to" seems like a great answer to me.

Anyway, I'm not entirely sure where this film would be without all the lies, as they account for so much of the marvelous imagery.  Michael Lonsdale, great here as the judge, tells her that her stories are "crap," though this doesn't save him, or anyone near her, from succumbing to the young woman's very easy way with seduction.  This is more or less Successive Slidings of Pleasure, because pure aesthetics are all the justification you need for several moments that might seem symbolic of something, and might actually be, but work best as just visual constructions, and movement, and color.  There's even a bit of whatever it's called when a filmmaker uses time, and the stretching of it, as a kind of hypnosis technique.  There's a long and very surreal section that begins with Alvina kneeling over a nude (and living -- is this one of the flashbacks? Am I supposed to believe this ever happened?) Georges-Picot, and before pouring what I think is supposed to be wine but looks like fruit punch over her body, Alvina first cracks a whole bunch of eggs over her, and the yolks fall on her (her breasts, her stomach, her crotch, and etc.) and pretty much all immediately slide off.  The "successive slidings of pleasure" of the title, maybe, if that's your thing, or was Nora's thing, if it happened, which, but anyway, so all the eggs slide off except one, which begins to slide but gets held up, it would appear, by Georges-Picot's hipbone.  The scene continues for a while, and I kept waiting for that dang yolk to slide on off, and I was watching it, looking for that one fatal shift in body weight, but nope.  Not to ruin anything for you.  The point being, I was, in a manner of speaking, gripped by suspense.

Like I was saying before, though, that's not all. Alain Robbe-Grillet, as I'm sure many of you know, is better known in the film world as the writer of Alain Resnais's Last Year in Marienbad, and better known in the wider world as a novelist and literary theorist. I've seen Last Year in Marienbad, but outside of that I'm afraid I couldn't tell you a whole lot about the man or what he wrote. Still, he was interviewed by The Paris Review back in 1986, and at one point in this long conversation about French literature, how and why Robbe-Grillet's work is so often misunderstood, and his intentions for the so-called "New Novel," he says this:

Memory belongs to the imagination. Human memory is not like a computer that records things; it is part of the imaginative process, on the same terms as invention. In other words, inventing a character or recalling a memory is part of the same process. This is very clear in Proust: For him there is no difference between lived experience—his relationship with his mother, and so forth—and his characters. Exactly the same type of truth is involved.

And later, when describing his novel Jealousy:

...[T]here is atmosphere of anxiety. [Jealousy] is the book of mine which has been described as the most dehumanized, where nothing happens; a serene, whitewashed world in which man seems perfectly reconciled with his environment. Yet it is exactly the opposite: it is an experiment with anxiety. The anxiety which Heidegger believes man must experience as the price of spiritual freedom.

And still later, while defending Flaubert from what Robbe-Grillet sees as a critical misreading:

In Flaubert everything lives in the text; it is the text itself which is in the process of living...

All of which goes somewhere towards, if not explaining, then at least pointing towards something I can latch on to so that I might begin to understand how what Robbe-Grillet achieves in these two films could have been achieved. This, by the way, is why I brought up Breathless, because that film never gave me any kind of emotional charge, yet the endings of both Trans-Europ-Express and Successive Slidings of Pleasure both did. The charge of the far more Breathless-esque Trans-Europ-Express is one of horror, but I can't for the life of me understand why I should even care about the things I'm experiencing horror about. I'd rather not give it away, but if you're watching the film and you start to feel some uneasiness about the introduction of bondage in the scenes between Trintignant and a prostitute played by Marie-France Pisier, and all the talk of rape, well, don't worry because you're not crazy. But it's all fake. We know this, we're told this, and it's reinforced. But two climactic scenes, one involving nude dancing (kind of) set to the kind of subterranean musical power surge warp and rumble David Lynch favors, carry a genuine moral and even metaphysical chill. Robbe-Grillet claimed to have been free from guilt and moral considerations, his depiction of violence, and sexual violence in particular, are free of the kind of mad decadence that sort of boasting implies.

And so it goes with Successive Slidings of Pleasure. That one is actually following a narrative thread to a pretty clear destination, for all the rest of the film's madness, and when it gets there the payoff is haunted by the giallo work of Argento, Bava, and so on (giallo is kind of everywhere in this film, to be honest) but not in a winking, referential way. It's horror -- it's real horror. As a matter of fact, the strong presence of giallo aside, I think Successive Slidings of Pleasure bears a greater affinity with the great the horror films of Jean Rollin. With Rollin, Robbe-Grillet shares a bizarre poetry that's all about sex and death, as well as evil. Rollin had a lot more life, in the positive sense, in his films, and Robbe-Grillet, at least here, has more grave absurdity. There's a little bit of disgust in Successive Slidings of Pleasure than you usually get from the sadder Rollin. Either way, with either filmmaker, it's definitely not a joke.