A businessman leaves his country home, and wife and young son for a business trip to Paris. While there he develops a sexual and spiritual bond with a call girl.
The successful “Sigismond” (Joe Dallessandro) has a sexually active relationship with his wife “Sergine” (Mireille Audibert) and dotes on his young son, but when he takes a business trip to Paris he receives a letter and is soon indulging lavishly on call-girl “Diana” (Sylvia Kristel) with whom he becomes more and more obsessed. Her procurer isn’t best pleased at this emerging arrangement and takes some fairly violent steps to dissuade his future ardours, but will that deter him? Essentially, this is a collection of soft porn scenarios where the camera lingers quite pruriently as the women undress and they have sex. Maybe it was novel for French cinema in 1976 to see nudity sexualised like his, but after about ten minutes of this story-less frolicking I was really quite bored. To be fair to “Sigismond”, there are clues to the rationale for his behaviour dotted about the latter parts of the film, and there’s quite a twist at the conclusion, but there’s no real effort to characterise either him nor “Diana” either in spirit or by using dialogue, and as it progressed it reminded me of those saucy postcards you’d buy at the seaside at the turn of the last century flipped together, or watched through a kaleidoscope. Frankly, this is really quite repetitious and dull. It’s not seedy or seamy, it’s not racy or sexy. Just dull.
Criterion Channel
