Fruits of Passion
A sex scene, with only Isabelle Illiers in it, was filmed but then it wasn't included in the final cut. In his autobiography, Klaus Kinski recalls: "The girl I'm supposed to place in a brothel has a delicious cheese. During one scene, she truly has a nervous breakdown when a mechanical dick on a kind of fuck machine is inserted into her hole. She throws herself on the cold, slimy sand floor of the studio and rolls and wallows in the filth, shrieking her lungs out. No one can get near her. I lovingly calm her down and take her to my dressing room. There I bend her over the makeup table in front of the mirror and give her a rough and thorough fuck from behind. Then she's fine again.",Obana: Leave him alone. If he wants to kill himself drinking's as good a way as any.
Kasen: Yeah, and the cemetary costs a lot less than the alcohol.,The 1998 VHS tape had 19 secs cut by the BBFC these cuts removed woman being whipped whilst on a wheel, a rough sex scene and sight of oral sex. The 2005 DVD was passed uncut.,Followed by The Story of O 2 (1984),This will not be a positive experience for everyone. Several things would be offputting. Most would be offended that it is based on a book with trivial sensibilities. There is explicit sex. The nature of the thing slips often into visual symbolism. Many languages are spoken. Some of the text is sophomoric. Obsession, perversion, sexual quest, caste and political struggle are mixed up with no apparent coherence. Advertised as erotic, it is anything but.

And yet. It is deliciously placed between Breilliat and Resnais and is better than most from them. If you watch a lot of movies and deeply, like I do, the better ones form a sort of tapestry that reinforce each other. Two of my "must-see" films are "Pillow Book" and "Fitzcarraldo," which this lean up against. Not of the same caliber of course, but there's a resonance.

There are some marvelous experiences here. For instance, the young girl is newly established in her sparse cell at the brothel. She has put on the bottom of her dress and stands at the night window, pining for Kinski (who is with another lover). Across the screen on the wall is her shadow, a lovely, lonely pose, breasts alert. She moves away from the window in impatience. The shadow remains unmoved.

Another: flashback to O as a girl, imprisoned by her father in a chalk square while he walks away and a clown rolls a flaming hoop about. The receding man turns into Kinski. Flash forward to the prostituted O, sewing the torn photo of Kinski, just before she is placed in a flying swan device to be sodomized by an aging client.

Another prostitute in the brothel is an aging actress. To get her to "perform," they set up a camera to pretend they are shooting, "Sunset Blvd." wise. We see this a couple times, then it shifts from the pretend movie to a (presumed) past, real movie. This raises an issue that leads to her suicide in the fashion of Ophelia. Her body in the pond is lifted by a rising piano.

The story (the parts that don't matter to me) is influenced by Kinski, partly autobiographical and right before we see the same character (in a similar white suit) in "Fitzcarraldo." The madness matters.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.,