C’EST GRADIVA QUI VOUS APPELLE (GRADIVA)

Directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet

Starring James Wilby, Dany Verissimo, Arielle Dombasle

2006, Mondo Macabro

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When Robbe-Grillet died three years ago, I was high quality cialis unaware that this staple of surrealistic erotica was still making films as recently as 2006. A key figure in Pete Tombs’ obligatory eurotrash tome Immoral Tales, Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922-2008) was known as the writer of Alain Resnais’ mind-melding masterpiece Last Year at Marienbad before branching out to explore his own realm of luscious sado-masochistic fantastica as a director.

In Gradiva, A historian (coincidentally named John Locke) travels to Morocco to study recently unearthed sketches by the 19^th century painter Delacroix. The mysterious drawings reveal an eroticism not apparent in much of Delacroix’ other work, leading Locke viagra cost with prescription to believe they are possibly frauds.  In many of the drawings is a blonde woman in white, who the historian swears he’s seen dreamily roaming the alleyways of Marrakesh. But it’s impossible: the woman in the drawings was executed over a century earlier for having an illicit affair with a travelling foreigner – possibly Delacroix himself.

He is led to a gentlemen’s club called The Golden Triangle, a place where Westerners congregate to participate in illegal pleasures.  The sketchy owner bills it as a finishing school for disobedient women, aimed at turning them into models and muses canadian online pharmacy no prescription needed for the arts. As with all of Robbe-Grillet’s work, the film is brimming with exotic, nubile young women, and The Golden Triangle offers a means of putting them on display in marvellous tableaux that recall the work of the painter at the core of the film’s obsessions (as well as some setpieces lifted right out of Robbe-Grillet’s Eden and After (1970)). It’s a shame then, that the male lead (Merchant-Ivory regular James Wilby) is flaccid viagra no prescription and repellent in comparison. Overall the acting is harsh and tersely punctuated, a characteristic that colours most of Robbe-Grillet’s films from Trans-Europ-Express (1967) onward, but this sometimes offers the only comic reprieve from their heady complexities.

Also typical of Robbe-Grillet is a preoccupation with cyclical compulsions, slavery and role-playing; as a result, Gradiva is full of doppelgangers and all the psychoanalytic mumbo jumbo such doubles imply. But, as Robbe-Grillet points out in the video buy cialis without a prescription interview that appears among the DVD extras, he likes to deny his audiences the stereotypical pleasures of an erotic film and instead deceive them with a critical distance that never allows them to fully engage with the characters. But this quality is what makes Robbe-Grillet’s films persevere: decry them as pretentious if you must, but there is much more going on than superficial titillation; they’re built for fans of The Evergreen Review more than Hustler.

While Robbe-Grillet is in company with Jean Rollin, Jess Franco and Fernando Arrabal  as one of the most integral components of the lofty Sadean erotic boom of the early 70s, one can’t help but feel that his films belong to another era, that his aesthetic has been watered down by today’s standards of beauty. The film just seems inherently melancholic, because it is so out of place now. But perhaps his films always were.

The DVD extras include cast and crew biographies, the theatrical trailer, production notes, and – most impressively – a rare video interview with Robbe-Grillet that has him discussing his audiences and critics, his themes, his views on erotica, censorship and more. Unfortunately his interviewer allows him to flit through these topics rather quickly, and for someone of his calibre it seems like a missed opportunity.

– Kier-La Janisse

About the author:

Kier-La Janisse

Kier-La Janisse is a film writer, publisher, producer, acquisitions executive for Severin Films and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. She is the author of Cockfight: A Fable of Failure (2024), House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012/2022) and A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (2007) and has been an editor on numerous books including Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive (2021) and Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015). She wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021), and produced the acclaimed blu-ray box sets All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror (2021) and The Sensual World of Black Emanuelle (2023).