Strange, cold film about a petty thief who becomes the lover of a dominatrix. The most intriguing thing is the design of her abode, which has a petit bourgeois apartment above a dungeon, linked by a ladder which can be let down or drawn up to gain access. The implication of this seems to be that there's a link between the pleasures derived from a BDSM scene and those derived from a more normative relationship - in the end, both are about pleasure and power. Some haunting scenes, especially one where a horse is killed in a knacker's yard. Depardieu's performance is typical of his 70s studies of masculinity in crisis.
The film is a kind of celebration of risk taking - the characters at the denouement foreshadow Cronenberg's auto-perverts in Crash - and a "do your own thing" type of liberation narrative. That the script doesn't excavate either where Ogier's wealthy clients get their money, nor the effect their exhibitionism and risk-taking might have on innocent by-standers shows that, whilst director Schroeder might think he has the gumption to explore "dangerous" and "outrageous" subject matter, he doesn't have the guts to really delve into the social implications of his characters and their lifestyles.
The film is a kind of celebration of risk taking - the characters at the denouement foreshadow Cronenberg's auto-perverts in Crash - and a "do your own thing" type of liberation narrative. That the script doesn't excavate either where Ogier's wealthy clients get their money, nor the effect their exhibitionism and risk-taking might have on innocent by-standers shows that, whilst director Schroeder might think he has the gumption to explore "dangerous" and "outrageous" subject matter, he doesn't have the guts to really delve into the social implications of his characters and their lifestyles.