Successive Slidings of Pleasure

Alain Robbe-Grillet, the novelist who co-wrote Last Year at Marienbad, points his puzzle-box formalism straight at the convent-and-bondage picture and comes out with something the grindhouse crowd and the arthouse both found baffling. A young woman held in a cell for a killing spends the film seducing and dismantling the judge, lawyer, priest and nun sent to break her, and the interrogation keeps dissolving into fetish tableaux of blood, broken glass and rope. Anicee Alvina plays her as pure provocation. Robbe-Grillet arranges the whole thing as a loop of repeating images that deliberately refuse to settle into a story or a point, which is either hypnotic or infuriating depending on the hour. Filed here for the nuns and the chains, and about as far from a Jess Franco quickie as that description can travel.