La prisonnière (1968)
Director:
Henri-Georges Clouzot
Writers:
Henri-Georges Clouzot (scenario, adaptation and dialogue), Monique Lange (scenario collaborator)
Stars:
Laurent Terzieff, Elisabeth Wiener, Bernard Fresson
A young female film editor specializes in discovering why other women degrade themselves in pornography and prostitution. She has a relationship with a boring artist, and her life is uneventful until she encounters an older, more worldly art dealer. The man shows her his photographs and she is mesmerized by a picture of a naked woman in chains. The man tries to hide the photo, but she is insistent on seeing it. The man admits this is how he gets aroused, by taking pictures of the bound beauties. The woman asks to come to a photo session where she is repulsed and intrigued at the same time. She leaves, but later returns to the man at his office and becomes hooked on his sadomasochistic voyeurism and begs to become the next model for his camera in the upcoming photo session. He brings in another woman and the session degenerates into a lesbian love fest that the man eagerly captures on film. Shamed, debased and degraded, she pulls her car onto a train track and contemplates her demise. Injured but not dead, she is straddled in her hospital bed when the man comes to visit. She goes into a psychedelic hallucination dream sequence in which her sexual escapades flash before her eyes as the man and her artist boyfriend engage in fisticuffs. Yikes!