La belle captive AKA The Beautiful Prisoner (1983) - Alain Robbe-Grillet

 

 Cathal Tohill and Peter Tombs wrote: Robbe-Grillet turned once again to painting and literature for inspiration in his next film. In 1976 he had written a ‘picto-novel’, La Belle Captive, which reprinted some of Magrittes’s paintings including La Belle Captive itself. His 1983 film of the same name used paintings by both Magritte and Edouard Manet as a launching pad, each painting a ‘generation cell’ for the film’s ideas and narrative. Magritte’s Belle Captive is a great painting – formal, poetic, mysterious, it hints at all sorts of possibilities. The drawn curtains open onto a beach and sky. In the stony foreground there is an easel and a painting that visually links the world behind the curtain with the vista in the distance. It’s an audacious, inspiring work that’s a self-conscious reflection on the process of painting, but is also eerie and enigmatic, exuding a strange beauty.

L'éden et après AKA Eden and After (1970) - Alain Robbe-Grillet

 

 Quote: A group of students go to the Eden club where they play bizarre and cruel games including fake Russian Roulette, strange rituals, rape, blood-drinking and poison, until a mysterious stranger appears and ups the ante. After a bloody magic trick, he provides an African drug to a girl who sees a montage of fearful images and then slowly appears to live them, wandering into a strange fluid factory and into a postcard of Tunisia, where murders, S&M sex, dancing and a nonsensical plot of kidnapping and torture in order to locate a painting take place. The film is an experience, a reality created by illusions, hallucinations and drugs, with bizarre visuals and details emerging little by little as some images develop into scenes, albeit incoherent ones.

Gradiva (C'est Gradiva qui vous appelle) (2006) - Alain Robbe-Grillet

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The revered and celebrated Alain Robbe-Grillet's supernatural drama C'est Gradiva qui vous appelle (AKA That is Gradiva Who Calls You) - a French-Belgian co-production - concerns John Locke, an art historian immersed in Asian research on the Marrakeshi casbah, accompanied by Belkis, his servant and mistress. Amid his studies of Eugene Delacroix, Locke repeatedly encounters a lithe, ethereal female presence in the city's medina (or Arabic quarter) who draws him seductively through the city's mazelike streets, again and again, but repeatedly vanishes. He then encounters Anatoli, a self-professed antique dealer and curator of Oriental artifacts for beginners itching for a challenge. Belkis persuades Locke to keep his distance from these individuals, but Locke blatantly ignores her admonitions and forges ahead - never quite realizing that the spirits are toying with him, and drawing him into a dead-end psychosexual black hole.

Glissements Progressifs Du Plaisir AKA SuccessiveSlidings of Pleasure (1974) - Alain Robbe-Grillet

Quote: When you think of art house directors you probably think of some of the more famous filmmakers like Werner Herzog (Aguirre, the Wrath of God), Peter Greenaway (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover) or Alejandro Jodorowsky (Holy Mountain). Someone you may not know is French writer and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet. Robbe-Grillet was part of the “nouveau roman” novelist movement which diverted from the classical style of writing and deviated from the norm with experimental prose. The same could be said with his film Glissements progressifs du plaisir (literal translation is “Gradual shifts of pleasure”) aka Successive Slidings of Pleasure where he blends dreamlike visuals with eroticism and, oddly, nunsploitation.

Le Jeu avec le feu AKA Playing with Fire (1975) - Alain Robbe-Grillet

When Carolina (Anicee Alvina), the daughter of wealthy banker Georges de Saxe (Philippe Noiret), is reported kidnapped, it is upsetting to him even though he knows it isn’t true. The kidnappers have taken the wrong person. The banker hires Frantz (Jean-Louis Trintignant) a disheveled, seedy detective to find his daughter and hide her safely away. She soon finds herself in a fantasyland whorehouse, where all kinds of extreme perversions are routinely practiced. There, a near-double of her father whips and then seduces her. Eventually, she and the private eye escape or leave, having extorted the kidnapping money from the girl’s father. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

Gradiva (C'est Gradiva qui vous appelle) AKA It'sGradiva Who Is Calling You (2006) - Alain Robbe-Grillet

Alain Robbe-Grillet's final film, an erotic ghost story set in Morocco. James Wilby plays an archaeologist pursuing the mysterious Arielle Dombasle through the streets of Marrakesh.
Review by Nathan Southern for All Movie Guide:

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The revered and celebrated Alain Robbe-Grillet's supernatural drama C'est Gradiva qui vous appelle (AKA That is Gradiva Who Calls You) - a French-Belgian co-production - concerns John Locke, an art historian immersed in Asian research on the Marrakeshi casbah, accompanied by Belkis, his servant and mistress. Amid his studies of Eugene Delacroix, Locke repeatedly encounters a lithe, ethereal female presence in the city's medina (or Arabic quarter) who draws him seductively through the city's mazelike streets, again and again, but repeatedly vanishes. He then encounters Anatoli, a self-professed antique dealer and curator of Oriental artifacts for beginners itching for a challenge. Belkis persuades Locke to keep his distance from these individuals, but Locke blatantly ignores her admonitions and forges ahead - never quite realizing that the spirits are toying with him, and drawing him into a dead-end psychosexual black hole.