DVD: Trans-Europ-Express/Successive Slidings of Pleasure

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). As in Godard’s contemporary films, familiar genre pleasures and glamorous stars are still enjoyed even as their artifice is explored, the train-bound script conference retroactively junking scenes we’ve just experienced as “real”.

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.