Former darling of the French film critics of the '60s, the late José Bénazéraf (who passed away quietly in late 2012, aged 90 and almost completely blind) went increasingly off the rails as pictorial permissiveness of successive decades allowed him to indulge private penchants his early works only hinted at. A lifelong "provocateur", he would go to battle up against the censors and distributors whom he felt were holding cinema hostage. Tired of his haranguing, these would retaliate by delaying the release of his 1966 crime sage JOE CALIGULA by almost three years and forcing him to delete over half an hour of sex and violence. By the time it finally reached theaters, it had already been robbed of its shock value. As a result, the audience stayed away in droves.
The director, whose early hothouse melodramas had Cahiers Du Cinéma scribes comparing him to the likes of Bunuel, Godard, Antonioni and - in the case of his magnificent COVER GIRLS - even Vincente Minnelli, subsequently took the headlong plunge into pornography. Tentatively at first (with hardcore illegal in France until 1974), his early excursions suggest a carnal cinema that might have been if it weren't for the exorbitant taxes and zoning restrictions imposed by the infamous "X" laws intended to stop the flurry of filth feared by the government.
One of his most accessible works, both in terms of narrative and general availability, FRUSTRATION comes very close to being a masterpiece. A chamber piece involving three central characters, it contains one of his cherished themes - eroticism as an act of rebellion against the conservatism of bourgeois society - already touched upon in the previous year's indigestible LE DESIRABLE ET LE SUBLIME, though thankfully stripped of much of his hollow philosophies borrowed from Marx, Engels and Freud. Bénazéraf's tendency to mix porn with politics is reduced to a bare minimum here, apart from the characters absentmindedly watching TV shows on the country's dire economic situation, narrated by the director himself !
Spinsterish Adelaide (former fashion model and international party girl Janine Reynaud creatively) lives with her beautiful younger sister Agnes (stunning Elizabeth Teissier) and the well-off physician she has married, Michel (Reynaud's then real life husband Michel Lemoine), in a gorgeous old château in the French countryside. Each day begins and ends the same way, with Agnes seeing her spouse off to work and life seemingly put on hold until his return by dinnertime. Inbetween, the sisters pass the time in an uneasy truce, barely acknowledging each other's presence. At night, Adelaide is torn up by her own repressed passions as she's forced to listen to her sister's noisy lovemaking. As a tease, Bénazéraf doesn't show us the first sex scene but only lets the audience listen in, as is Adelaide's torturous plight. This segues into a memorable fantasy sequence of Reynaud running down a long corridor, opening door after door, only to find Agnes and Michel behind each of them, every time "frozen" in a different sexual position.
To upset the apple cart, Adelaide tells Agnes that Michel is fooling around on her, with a cheap prostitute no less, imagining herself in the part. Watching future astrologist Teissier fret about her husband's infidelity acquires a retro-active irony when one realizes the actress would eventually become the most heavily publicized mistress in France, to that country's president François Mitterrand ! Adelaide's behavior seems to suggest that she has designs on Michel herself and is indeed trying to drive a wedge between him and her sister. Truth is however that she has always decried Agnes's abandoning of both intellectual and economic self-sufficiency to the prison of marriage. Hey, they don't call it "wedlock" for nothing ! As she disapproved of their union, the intimacy shared by the sisters in their youth eventually turned to barely contained hatred. A tricky progression over the film's two final climactic sex scenes - a threesome with Michel dividing his attentions between both siblings and a lesbian coupling that literally forces him out of the picture altogether - reveal that this hatred is very much directed inwards as Agnes and Adelaide are shown to be one and the same, a woman disgusted with how much of herself she has had to "sacrifice" in order to obtain wedded "bliss".
The movie is at its strongest when this psychologically complex plot (typically told from the viewpoint of the "untrustworthy narrator") is related in comparatively straightforward fashion, basically over the course of the three sex scenes involving the central characters. The arrival of a British couple whose car broke down near the château only serves to dilute the dramatic intensity, leading to fantasy flashbacks to the Spanish Inquisition (huh ?) that feature Jess Franco muse Pamela Stanford among the abused peasant girls. It's a tribute to the strengths of the story and its three superlative interpreters that these extraneous segments ultimately cause no irreparable harm. The ravishing Reynaud has been mostly cast as weary women of the world but is absolutely riveting as quite the opposite here. Teissier also proves quite accomplished as she gradually dissolves into crippling insecurity when learning of Michel's alleged betrayal.
Likewise, the film's eroticism is at its most potent when it's most closely linked to the narrative. While not all that explicit, the sex comes across as extremely intense because of the dramatic repercussions it signals towards. Music is most sparingly employed with several long sequences (not just sexual ones) taking place in total silence and apparently uninterrupted takes. Another movie to use wintry isolation as a metaphor for its characters' feeble mental state, FRUSTRATION benefits tremendously from the exquisitely composed images conjured up by the underrated Georges Strouvé who shot several films for French outlaw film critic turned filmmaker Paul Vecchiali, including his fabulous foray into fornication CHANGE PAS DE MAIN from 1975, the final year when everything still seemed possible for the genre.
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