Carole (Sandra Julien) is a rather innocent very sexually repressed girl living in a provincial town in France. She’s a virgin and she gets nervous if her boyfriend Eric (Alain Hitier) makes even the slightest attempt at physical intimacy.
One thing I liked is that this film doesn’t resort to crude clichés like childhood trauma to explain her previous sexual repression. Her childhood was not nightmarish. It was just boring. Her parents did not mistreat her. They were just dull and conformist and very repressed. Her life was simply stifling.
Then Carole has an accident. She falls down a flight of stairs. She suffers no serious physical injuries but something very serious has happened to her brain. She is now a nymphomaniac! She can’t stop touching herself and she can’t stop thinking about the pleasures of the flesh.
She is of course appalled. Even thinking about such things is wicked.
She now feels like a scarlet woman and she will of course have to leave her home and go to Paris. That’s where wicked women go.
After her boss’s nephew seduces her boss sends her to Paris to work for his sister. Murielle (Janine Reynaud) runs an art gallery so we figure that she is probably sexually depraved. Which turns out to be the case. Murielle seduces her and then sets her up with decadent Roman businessman Bruno (Michel Lemoine).
Carole naturally seeks medical help but while she is assured that nymphomania is curable it sounds like it will be a long cure. She decides to try religion but that doesn’t seem to help.
As a nymphomaniac she’s a bit of an under-achiever. But any sexual urges at all have always horrified her and they still horrify her. She is consumed with guilt. After a bizarre carnival sequence she tries to slash her wrists.
Then kindly handsome young doctor Michel (Patrick Verde). He is sure he can cure her. He moves her into his apartment. Yes, you might think that’s a bit ethically dubious but even though Carole is smokin’ hot and perpetually horny he is never tempted by her. He’s a doctor. No doctor would take advantage of a patient in a situation like this. Even when she takes her clothes off and starts climbing all over him in bed he isn’t tempted. Doctors are so dedicated!
The story is played very very straight. The temptation would have been to take a tongue-in-cheek approach but that temptation is resisted.
In an odd way the fact that it’s played so straight makes it feel more wild and crazy than it would have been had it been played overtly wild and crazy. It’s extremely difficult to believe that the audience is expected to take all this nonsense seriously. Carole is subjected to a battery of physical examinations to determine whether she’s a true nymphomaniac.
Of course it’s also possible that Pécas was trying to avoid censorship problems, much as early 60s American sexploitation movies would offer lots of salacious material but add a preface in which a respectable doctor would warn us that this is a serious film addressing a problem that threatens the nation’s youth and the moral fibre of society. In other words Pécas may be offering what exploitation filmmakers called a “square-up” - presenting titillation in the guise of a public service.
In fact I’m convinced that Pécas is winking at us and assumes that we are not going to take anything in this movie the slightest bit seriously.
The acting is mostly OK. Sandra Julien is gorgeous and is able to sell us on the idea that Carole is a sweet innocent girl tortured by her lusts. The standout performer is the always amazing Janine Raynaud as the cheerfully depraved Murielle.
The sex scenes are tame but they’re artfully and imaginatively shot in a manner reminiscent of Radley Metzger’s style.
I Am a Nymphomaniac is most interesting for its odd subtle off-kilter feel. I enjoyed it and I recommend it.
I’ve reviewed a much earlier Max Pécas movie, Daniella By Night (1961), a spy thriller romance staring Elke Sommer and the excellent classy sophisticated juvenile delinquent movie Sweet Violence (1962), again with Elke Sommer.
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