The first thing that needs to be made clear about this movie is its explicitness. In the 70s it was fairly standard practice in low-budget European film-making to release several different cuts of a movie. Censorship varied from country to country so some cuts would be raunchier than others. It was also common for hardcore scenes to be added. These were sometimes shot without the knowledge of the director and with different crews and actors. In the case of Doriana Grey there’s not the slightest doubt that the movie was originally shot hardcore and that the stars of the movie did the hardcore scenes themselves. If you have a problem with hardcore sex scenes you won’t want to watch this movie.
What also needs to be said is that this is not a mere hardcore porn movie. There’s a lot more to it than that. What also needs to be said is that once you accept that this is a movie about eroticism then the sex scenes and the very explicit nudity don’t seem gratuitous. They’re the core of the movie. You cannot understand the motivations of the characters without the sex scenes.
There was a softcore version, Das Bildnis der Doriana Gray, with extra scenes (almost certainly not shot by Franco) added to replace the hardcore scenes. So this is an odd example of a 70s European exploitation movie in which the hardcore version is unquestionably the film that the director wanted to make. And in this case the hardcore scenes are necessary in order to convey the extremeness and intensity of the sexual frenzy that drives the plot.
On to the movie. Lady Doriana Gray (Lina Romay) is very rich and very decadent. She lives in a luxurious château. She has everything anyone could want. But she is bored and unhappy.
She has a twin sister (also played by Lina Romay). This twin sister is confined to a lunatic asylum. It seems that they may have been siamese twins. While the twin sister is hopelessly insane it’s obvious that Lady Doriana is also deeply disturbed. The problem is that the two sisters are both incomplete. Lady Doriana is obsessed by sex but she cannot achieve full sexual pleasure. When she should be achieving full sexual pleasure it’s her mad sister who experiences the sexual ecstasy and the orgasm. The twin sister is too child-like to understand what is happening. It frightens her and it has sent her mad.
Lady Doriana’s inability to experience sexual pleasure has had equally devastating consequences. She cannot experience love fully because sexual pleasure is part of love. That’s why she is lonely and unhappy.
Lady Doriana is all mind. Her twin is all body.
In Wilde’s novel Dorian experiences all the pleasures of the flesh but it’s his portrait that reflects the prices of those pleasures. Dorian and his portrait are doubles, or mirrors. In this movie it is the twin sister who is the double. She experiences not the costs of sensual pleasures but the bliss, but the consequences are equally damaging.
Lady Doriana is also a vampire, of sorts. This is vampirism shorn of all the usual vampiric trappings. This is one of several movies in which Franco explored the sexual dynamics of vampirism and the idea of the sex vampire. Which was a perfectly legitimate thing to do since right from the beginning, right back to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1979 poem Christabel, vampire fiction was all about sex. Vampirism was always a metaphor for sex. Franco just decided to be totally up-front about it and explore the idea in detail, in movies like the excellent Female Vampire (also with Lina Romay). Doriana Grey is a logical development of the ideas Franco was exploring in other movies at this time.
Lina Romay was interesting because she was at best a competent actress fully clothed but once she took her clothes off she became a great actress. Being naked unleashed something in her. If you wanted an actress to depict the effects of sexual obsession, sexual frenzy or sexual madness then Lina Romay was the actress to do it. She didn’t just express sexuality on camera. She became sex, in all its terrifying and wondrous intensity and delirium.
She really is quite scary in the lesbian rape scene. And yes, it’s quite definitely rape.
This movie is very much a one-woman show. The two rôles played by Lina Romay are the only characters that count. Romay has to carry the entire film on her own. Which she does, without any problems. Franco was amazingly lucky that the two most notable actresses with whom he worked, Romay and Soledad Miranda, both had so much screen presence that they could totally dominate a movie to the extent that the other cast members were not much more than props and could create female characters who were sufficiently mesmerising to engage our attention fully.
The movie was shot partly at the Villa Kerylos in the south of France and partly in Portugal. Once again Franco finds the perfect locations for the sorts of movies he was making.
If you want to see this movie you have a choice between the German DVD release and the German Blu-Ray release. Both are English-friendly. The Blu-Ray offers a very fine transfer.
Doriana Grey is the apotheosis of 70s Franco. The eroticism is combined with a dream-like atmosphere and a poetic and tragic mood. Doriana and her sister are victims of a whimsical but cruel fate. Lady Doriana is not really evil. She kills without quite knowing how or why, driven by an insatiable appetite not just for sexual fulfilment but for love and completeness. It may be Franco’s greatest film and Lina Romay’s performance may be the best of her career. Very highly recommended.
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