The setting is a contemporary one. Countess Martine de Bressac (Alice Arno) has just been released from a mental hospital to which she’d been confined after slicing off a lover’s manhood. The psychiatrist in charge of her case is now confident that she’s cured. The poor innocent fool has no idea what he’s dealing with.
The Countess has an enthusiasm for art. She enjoys painting female nudes but her real pride and joy is her museum, filled with female mannequins, all naked and all captured in moments of extreme terror. Or are they mannequins? Are they real people? Or were they real people?
Her husband Count Charles de Bressac (Robert Woods) shares her tastes for debauching female innocence. This unsettling household is completed by the countess’s mute servant girl Adèle (Lina Romay).
The count has come up with a new project that he thinks will cheer his wife up after her unfortunate but mercifully brief incarceration. He has discovered a charming young woman named Cécile (Tania Busselier), 21 years old, the daughter of a diplomat. The young woman is a virgin. This is important, because debauching virgins gives the count and countess particular pleasure. For they are indeed going to debauch her. If not worse.
Before beginning the process of corrupting Cécile the de Bressacs watch her. They have taken up a position from which they can, with the aid of binoculars, observe her bedroom. What they see excites them a good deal. It seems that Martine and Charles are as excited by voyeurism as much as by actual sex, and that perhaps it’s the idea of seducing an innocent rather than the seduction itself that is the attraction. And of course the audience is also in the position of voyeur rather than participant. The voyeurism element is one of the ways in which this film, usually thought of as being a very Sadeian Franco film, departs from de Sade.
The ending is also somewhat un-Sadeian. While de Sade dismissed moral judgments as irrelevant the film, surprisingly, does suggest that perhaps indulgence in such libertinism can come at a price. It raises the question of whether Franco really swallowed de Sade’s puerile philosophies as completely as is generally assumed. And while this is for the most part a pure exercise in style and eroticism the chilling ending is worthy of a horror film.
A major preoccupation of Franco’s was the blurring of the line between fantasy and reality. This preoccupation makes its presence felt here most obviously in the countess’s museum. Apparently the original script contained overt suggestions of the supernatural. Those elements were largely removed at the insistence of the producer and that may have strengthened the film since the nature of the countess’s museum exhibits is so ambiguous. We assume that the figures are wax dummies or something similar, then we find ourselves thinking they’re people but they’re dead but then we get the very uncomfortable suspicion that maybe they’re not dead.
Of course the depraved world that the de Bressacs have created for themselves is in a sense an artificial world. They are trying to live out their most extreme fantasies. Do they know that they now inhabit a kind of self-created fantasy world, a kind of insane dream? Are they in any sense sane? And since we see everything from their point of view we might even be tempted to ask whether any of it is in fact real. The countess does start the film in a mental hospital. Perhaps everything we see in the film is a dream, or maybe a dream that has somehow intersected with the real world? If we see these events through her eyes is she in a sense an unreliable narrator?
Of course this is a Jess Franco movie so even though there is a plot (and it’s a real plot which even includes an interesting red herring towards the end) it’s the style that matters. Apart from film and eroticism Franco had two other obsessions - jazz and architecture. What’s intriguing is the way he combines all these obsessions in his films. He doesn’t use jazz as a mere soundtrack. He structures his movies like jazz improvisations. And he had an uncanny ability to find superb locations which provided absolutely perfect settings for his films. The house used in this film was also used in Countess Perverse (which began shooting immediately after this one without a break and with the same cast and crew). It’s exactly the sort of bizarre almost surrealist house that a couple like the de Bressacs would live in. These two intimately paired films, Plaisir à trois and Countess Perverse, were among the many Franco made in the Canary Islands.
Exploitation movies combining softcore erotica with thriller and/or horror elements were certainly not unusual in the 70s. It was also not unusual for such movies to feature a considerable amount of weirdness. There are a number of things that sets Franco’s films of this type apart. The weirdness is both interesting and genuinely disturbing. And they are erotic in a strange unsettling way. A woman having sex with a store mannequin might not be an original idea but when the woman is Lina Romay the effect is startling. She does it like she means it.
This was Romay’s first big rôle in a Franco film and she’s cast as an insane sex-obsessed woman who may be totally depraved or so disconnected from reality as to be totally innocent. To say that Romay makes an impact would be understating things.
Alice Arno is equally disturbing and equally impressive, as is Tania Busselier as Cécile.
This movie offers three actresses all of whom are certainly beautiful and all of whom give performances that are extremely erotically charged whilst making us feel rather uneasy about that eroticism. It might perhaps also be worth mentioning that all three actresses spend most of the film naked. If you want non-stop nudity and sex combined with visual flair and an atmosphere of overheated decadence plus some unsettling ideas and some arty touches then this is a movie for you.
Mondo Macabro’s DVD release is fullframe (which is how the film was shot), the transfer is excellent and there are a couple of worthwhile extras. Highly recommended.
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