This film was made on a ridiculously low budget (500,000 francs), which suited Robbe-Grillet since what he wanted most of all was artistic freedom. He was happy to keep within such a minuscule budget if he could make the film he wanted to make without interference. Which is appropriate since the movie deals (among other things) with themes of freedom from stifling social controls.
The biggest star in the movie is Jean-Louis Trintignant (who starred in Robbe-Grillet’s wonderful Trans-Europ Express). Officially they couldn’t afford him, but he was a friend of Robbe-Grillet and was apparently happy to do the movie for nothing.
The movie starts with the arrival of a police inspector at a murder scene. An unnamed girl (played by Anicée Alvina) may have murdered her room-mate Nora (Olga Georges-Picot). The girl claims that a man has been following her and that he broke in and killed Nora. Nora is nude and tied to the bed and she and the girl had been, apparently, involved in some sort of sexual game involving art and bondage (this is an Alain Robbe-Grillet film).
The girl’s story is unlikely and it’s full of holes and contradictions but it may be true. It’s also possible that she’s crazy and has no idea if she murdered Nora or not. Everything we see through the girl’s eyes could be true or false or it could be misrememberings or misinterpretations.
We also can’t be sure that the theories that occur to the police inspector or to the examining magistrate (Michel Lonsdale) have any basis in reality. We can’t be sure if anything has any basis in reality (Alain Robbe-Grillet was after all the guy who wrote Last Year at Marienbad).
The girl is confined in a prison run by nuns (and one scene was according to Tim Lucas shot in the very cell in which the Marquis de Sade had been confined). There probably weren’t any prisons run by nuns in France in 1974. But this is a surrealist film so the prison is run by nuns.
The narrative jumps about all over the place. There is a narrative but it’s disconnected and fragmented and it certainly isn’t linear in time. To complicate things, we have no idea what we can believe and what we can’t believe. Many of the events of the movie may be imaginary but we can’t be sure whose imagination they’re taking place in. The girl thinks she can cause people’s deaths with her thoughts and she thinks that she had been responsible for the death of a teacher at her school. We see the teacher’s death in a flashback but we have to remember that this is a memory that may have become totally distorted in her mind.
Anicée Alvina is extraordinary and mesmerising.
There are numerous shots that look liker surrealist paintings (especially by Magritte - Robbe-Grillet later made the superb La Belle Captive inspired by Magritte’s paintings). There are mannequins, and there are mannequins that may be real and women who may be mannequins. In most scenes Nora, even when alive, is as still as a mannequin.
While the film school crowd would no doubt prefer to compare Robbe-Grillet to Luis Buñuel, Buñuel being the sort of surrealist that they dote on. I personally think Robbe-Grillet has more in common with Jean Rollin.
This is a movie that was bitterly attacked by feminists at the time, much to the amusement of Robbe-Grillet’s wife Catherine who points out in her introduction that the feminists missed the point of the movie entirely.
Robbe-Grillet ended up in a strange position. He first made a name for himself as an avant-garde novelist in the 1950s. His screenplay for Last Year at Marienbad and his first directorial efforts, L’Immortelle and Trans-Europ Express, established him as a maker of art films. From 1970 onwards though the nudity, the sexual subject matter and the sadomasochistic undercurrents in his films made him not quite respectable among the usual audience for art films (and not quite resectable among critics). So he ended up caught somewhere between the worlds of art films and exploitation movies. Like the other great French surrealist movie-maker of that era, Jean Rollin, he was attacked by critics who simply couldn’t comprehend what he was trying to do.
While Robbe-Grillet’s movies are very much art movies you shouldn’t make the mistake of taking them too seriously. Robbe-Grillet thought that art could be fun. He thought it was OK to enjoy art. The secret to appreciating his movies is just to settle back and enjoy the ride. And don’t worry about trying to make sense of everything. His movies are not realist films. They’re surrealism. Things are not necessarily supposed to make sense in a conventional manner. And some things are intentionally left ambiguous and mystifying.
This movie has been released by The British Film Institute as part of a boxed set (available on both DVD and Blu-Ray) called Alain Robbe-Grillet: Six Films 1963-1974. The anamorphic transfer is very good. The extras include an illuminating audio commentary by Tim Lucas, an introduction by Robbe-Grillet’s wife Catherine and portions of an interview with the director.
Successive Slidings of Pleasure is at times bizarre, often playful and always puzzling but if you just let the movie take you where it wants to take you you’ll have quite a ride. Very highly recommended.
I’ve also reviewed Last Year at Marienbad, L’immortelle, La belle captive (which in my view is his masterpiece) and Trans-Europ-Express - all of which I highly recommend.
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