Fruits of Passion

This will not be a positive experience for everyone. Several things would be offputting. Most would be offended that it is based on a book with trivial sensibilities. There is explicit sex. The nature of the thing slips often into visual symbolism. Many languages are spoken. Some of the text is sophomoric. Obsession, perversion, sexual quest, caste and political struggle are mixed up with no apparent coherence. Advertised as erotic, it is anything but.

And yet. It is deliciously placed between Breilliat and Resnais and is better than most from them. If you watch a lot of movies and deeply, like I do, the better ones form a sort of tapestry that reinforce each other. Two of my "must-see" films are "Pillow Book" and "Fitzcarraldo," which this lean up against. Not of the same caliber of course, but there's a resonance.

There are some marvelous experiences here. For instance, the young girl is newly established in her sparse cell at the brothel. She has put on the bottom of her dress and stands at the night window, pining for Kinski (who is with another lover). Across the screen on the wall is her shadow, a lovely, lonely pose, breasts alert. She moves away from the window in impatience. The shadow remains unmoved.

Another: flashback to O as a girl, imprisoned by her father in a chalk square while he walks away and a clown rolls a flaming hoop about. The receding man turns into Kinski. Flash forward to the prostituted O, sewing the torn photo of Kinski, just before she is placed in a flying swan device to be sodomized by an aging client.

Another prostitute in the brothel is an aging actress. To get her to "perform," they set up a camera to pretend they are shooting, "Sunset Blvd." wise. We see this a couple times, then it shifts from the pretend movie to a (presumed) past, real movie. This raises an issue that leads to her suicide in the fashion of Ophelia. Her body in the pond is lifted by a rising piano.

The story (the parts that don't matter to me) is influenced by Kinski, partly autobiographical and right before we see the same character (in a similar white suit) in "Fitzcarraldo." The madness matters.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

I really like Kinski he is a great actor. I've seen this movie because I've heard that there are autobiographic aspects in this movie.

The film is full of symbols like a piano sinking in a river or strange shadow-pictures at the walls. Then the narrator always says abstract sentences like: "A kid sells fortune, but her box is empty now." This is really disturbing and wasn't really necessary, because everyone understands what this movie is all about. The movie shows how Kinski's character treated woman, and how he kept them under control. If there are really some aspects of Kinski's life in this story - then he really was an swine. So there is no need to watch this movie, unless if you want to see Kinski naked or if you like sick trash movies to laugh about.

I have often expressed the desire to see Kinski in a graphic sex film, but of course I meant NASTASSIA Kinski, not Klaus. But I got the "monkey's paw" version of my wish here with this sequel to "The Story of O" based on a novel by the same pseudononymous author ("Pauline Reage"). In this film "O" (Isabella Illiers, replacing Corinne Clery) has been taken to Asia and put in a brothel by her much older lover/master Sir Stephen (Klaus Kinski). He comes back from time to time to have sex with her, or to spy on her with "clients", or to tie her up and force her to watch as he has wild sex with his other young mistress (Arielle Dombasle). A local teenager spies her through the barred windows of the brothel, and when Stephen sees her making love to the boy (perhaps the most questionable scene as the actor really does look to only be about 14--but I'm sure he got over it), he realizes that he is beginning to lose control over her.

This film has less S and M and bondage than the original "Story of O", but the sex scenes are much more graphic. There is one obviously unsimulated oral sex scene and another "missionary" scene with Kinski and Illiers that looks pretty unsimulated as well. If you consider this a hardcore porn film, it is a veritable masterpiece. The cinematography is excellent and the musical score is good. There are a lot of poetic images--for instance, a long shot of a dead bird floating in the bay outside the convent, and later a surreal Jean Rollinesque image of a drowned woman floating on a grand piano (?!) in this same bay. Most hardcore porn films wouldn't bother with such arty digressions. As an art film though, which this is also obviously trying to be, it is less successful, mostly because all the characters are pretty thinly drawn.

Illiers (who was never really to be seen again in films) is OK. She's not a great actress (she's not even a mole on Corrine Clery's beauteous backside), but she can at least look convincingly forlorn (something I can't imagine any American porn actress doing). Arielle Dombasle is perhaps most recognizable from Eric Rohmer's "Pauline at the Beach" where she played the title character's incredibly sexy but slow-witted and slutty older cousin. In "Pauline" her young character falls madly in love with a balding, middle-aged cad for some reason. Here she has apparently moved on to the elderly. It is actually pretty damn hard to buy either of these tres gorgeous jeun French filles (pardon my Franglish) being in love with Klaus Kinski who looks pretty much like grim death here. Kinski is pretty good I guess, but he seems rather bored and contemptuous of his role--but then he was ALWAYS like that (except perhaps in his films with Herzog where he, sometimes literally, had a gun to his head). I'd still rather see his daughter have graphic sex with Illiers and Dombasle of course, but he--and this whole film--aren't too bad overall I guess.

... in particular, I was thinking that "Lust, Caution" blended the aspects of eroticism and uprising/terrorism much more effectively - not helped here by (in my view) the relatively unconvincing acting of the lovelorn young rebel.

Having said that, I was not at all impressed by Just Jaeckin's "Story of O" (the alleged predecessor), and this is better than that, IMHO. And Kinski is clearly having a lot of "fun" (of his own kind). I can't decide whether Illiers' relative blankness is actually an appropriate asset, given the context and character, or also a problem.

Meanwhile, there's some nice touches of humour, and the cinematography and set design is pretty good, so it doesn't feel at all like "a cheap piece of trash" - even if some may think that's exactly what it is :)

Worth a look.

I bought this film on DVD despite the "stale" review and that was idiotic... That review was completely accurate and I have never seen any worse "erotic" film in my long life! Even if it partly was lovely filmed and had interesting surroundings, plus a nice cover... But my own Extreme Erotica (c) films are over 100 times more erotic (just in the soft delicious aspect) with probably less than 100 times of this films budget! The story have no logical connection with the first film or the famous book... Or any new (exciting) element of slave training, except some very strange and sad developments... Then did the main male character - Klaus Kinski - not look a bit like the second Master of "O" he try to play... And not even lovely Arielle Dombasle, did look delicious in any scene!