Still best-known in Britain for scripting Alain Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad (1961), Alain Robbe-Grillet’s films as sole auteur develop that landmark work’s slippery reality. Like the novels with which he first made his name, Trans-Europ-Express (1966) draws attention to and fractures its own construction, as Robbe-Grillet, his producer, his wife Catherine as a canny continuity assistant and the film’s star, Jean-Louis Trintignant, all board the titular train. Robbe-Grillet cooks up a potboiler plot with his collaborators about a trench-coated cocaine smuggler’s tense trips between Paris and Antwerp on the Express, while we watch Trintignant in that thriller (pictured below right).
Robbe-Grillet’s sparky 2007 interviews with critic Frederic Taddei, from the year before the director’s death aged 85, explain the low-budget film biz reality behind such avant-garde projects: Belgian money influenced the cinematic route of a train the producer blagged as a free set, whose glass-heavy surfaces allowed intricate mirror-images, updating the Orient Express’s mystique for a glistening, black-and-white New Europe. Robbe-Grillet also happily admits to Taddei that he was exploring his own fantasies in the dangerous sadomasochistic games Trintignant plays with Marie-France Pisier’s beautiful, unreliable prostitute in her apartment.
Such sexuality also powers Successive Slidings of Pleasure (1974), a more explicit and abstract, richly-coloured restatement of themes. Anicée Alviria, barely out of her teens, is its dominant star, despite the uncredited return of Trintignant as a detective, pictured below with Alviria, and Michael Lonsdale as a judge. Alviria’s Alice is discovered alongside her female flatmate-lover’s scissor-stabbed corpse. She is questioned in a jail with a medieval dungeon for a basement, staffed by white-robed nuns as randy as the female prisoners. At least, that’s Alice’s story, as her unabashed sexuality and self-exploited innocence drive her male interrogators to distraction.
Successive Slidings... certainly adds to the ongoing, dubious tradition of beautiful young actresses getting their kits off for male Euro-arthouse auteurs (to the “utterly heterosexual” Robbe-Grillet’s delight, his wife Catherine recalls in another of these releases’ extras). Alviria’s natural confidence and challenging stares at the viewer – part potent sorceress, part cocky, coquettish teenager – still seem wholly feminist in effect, despite 1974 feminists’ protests at the film’s one-sided nudity.
Made on an absurdly low budget to meet a producer’s whimsical challenge, the sensual tableaux, bare-walled backdrops and painterly, often blood-red colours create a still more artificial, feverish world than Trans-Europ-Express, tethered only by image, theme and Alviria’s presence. Both releases recall a lost art cinema, where cheerful perversity sold the avant-garde.
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